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Creamed Fish in Potato Cups
Discard all bones and skin from any boiled or fried fish. Season well with salt, pepper, and a little lemon-juice. Make white sauce No. 3 (see page 68), allowing half as much sauce as fish.
Add a slight grating of nutmeg to the sauce and add fish to it. Put the mixture in potato cups and brown lightly in oven.
A leftovers formula rather than a fixed recipe: the proportions matter more than the quantities, and the book assumes you already know its numbered white sauces and its potato cups.
- White sauce No. 3The book sends you to page 68 for the proportions, so check there rather than guessing; numbered sauce systems of the period generally run from thin to thick, and what is wanted here is a binding-grade sauce that holds a spoon-track, since a thin one will run out of the potato and flood the pan.
- Sauce to fish ratioHalf as much sauce as fish, by volume. Two cups of flaked fish takes about one cup of thick sauce — enough to bind, not to swim.
- Potato cupsStiff mashed potato piped or moulded into nests on a buttered tray, or the scooped-out halves of baked potatoes. Mash for this should be dry and firm, with egg yolk beaten in if it is at all loose, or it will slump in the oven.
- Browning temperatureThe recipe says only "brown lightly in oven" and gives neither heat nor time. A hot oven works best here: the aim is colour on the potato and a bubbling filling, not further cooking of the fish, which is already done.
- Reheat once, and thoroughlyCooked fish should be refrigerated promptly and used within a couple of days. Bring the filled cups through to steaming hot right at the centre rather than just tanning the surface.
- Fish to useFirm white fish, salmon and smoked haddock all work. Break it into flakes with your fingers so you catch the pin bones the recipe tells you to discard; oily fish such as mackerel tends to overwhelm a nutmeg-scented cream sauce.
- Nutmeg and lemonA slight grating means slight — perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon for a cup of sauce. The lemon juice goes on the fish, not into the hot milk sauce, where it can encourage curdling.
- YieldThe recipe states no quantities at all, being a proportion rather than a measured formula. As a rough guide, about 2 cups of flaked fish plus its sauce will fill roughly six potato cups.
Books of left-overs were a small industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when household economy was treated as a branch of domestic science and waste was a moral as well as a financial failing. The technique here — bind cold cooked protein in a thick white sauce, encase it in something starchy, brown the top — is the workhorse of the genre, and the same page could as easily read chicken or veal. Potato cups, sometimes called potato nests or borders, gave a plain reheated dish the outline of a composed course, which mattered in kitchens where serving the same fish twice was something to be disguised. The numbered white sauces are a sign of the era's systematising instinct: cookery schools taught one roux in graded thicknesses for soups, gratins and croquettes, and expected the cook to reach for a number rather than a recipe.