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Cold Fish with Cold Hollandaise Sauce
Arrange slices of any cold boiled fish on a platter, Cover them with slices of hard-cooked eggs which have been seasoned with salt and pepper. Remove the bones and rub two or three sardines to a smooth paste. Add them to any left-over Hollandaise sauce (see page 72). When ready to serve pour the sauce over the fish and sprinkle a few chopped capers over all.
A composed cold plate built from three leftovers at once — fish, hollandaise and hard-cooked eggs. It works, but only if the components have been handled well.
- The hinge: cold hollandaiseHollandaise is a warm butter emulsion; chilled, the butter sets and it stops being a pouring sauce. Let the refrigerated sauce come up to cool room temperature and whisk it smooth before it goes over the fish; if it needs help, warm it very gently and off direct heat, since too much heat will break it.
- Leftover sauce keeps badlyAn egg-yolk-and-butter emulsion is a hospitable medium for bacteria, and hollandaise is cooked only gently, so it cannot be assumed to have been held long enough at a pasteurising temperature. Refrigerate it the moment the first meal is over, use it within a day, and discard any that sat out through dinner service.
- Cold boiled fishAny firm white fish works — cod, haddock, halibut, salmon. Slice it across the grain into clean pieces roughly half an inch thick; flaked fish disappears under the sauce. Refrigerated cooked fish is at its best within two days.
- SardinesOil-packed tinned sardines, drained. Skinning and boning two or three gives about a tablespoon of paste, enough to season roughly a cup of sauce. Mash them in a mortar or press through a sieve — food-processor sardines go pasty and grey rather than smooth.
- CapersRinse brined capers and pat dry so their vinegar does not thin the sauce; salt-packed capers need a longer soak. A tablespoon, chopped, is plenty for a platter.
- Assembly and timingSauce the fish only at the table or immediately before it goes out — sardine hollandaise sitting on cold fish soon weeps and dulls.
- YieldSlices from a pound of cooked fish, three hard-cooked eggs and a cup of sauce make a first course for four or a light lunch for two or three.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to leftovers were a small industry, in an age when wasting food was a moral failing as much as an economic one. The trick this recipe performs is the standard one of the genre: rather than reheating, it recasts the remains as a deliberately cold dish, so nothing has to pretend to be fresh from the pan. Sardine paste stirred into hollandaise is a thrifty domestic cousin of the various anchovy-enriched butters of the professional kitchen — the salty cured fish supplies the depth that a day-old sauce has lost. Capers and sliced hard-cooked egg over cold fish is an old arrangement, and it survives today in the garnish for a poached salmon on a buffet.