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Creamed Fish
Make as much white sauce No. 2 (see page 68) as there is flaked fish, and add a slight grating of nutmeg. Season the fish well with salt and pepper, and add to the hot sauce, together with a few spoonfuls of cooked green peas, and serve as soon as heated.
A one-paragraph method that assumes you already have flaked cooked fish and a standing recipe for white sauce. The proportions are given by volume, which is the useful part.
- White sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces in books of this period are generally graded from thin to thick, so No. 2 is likely the ordinary medium pouring sauce; check page 68 rather than assuming. If you are substituting, a medium sauce is in the region of 1 to 2 tablespoons each butter and flour cooked together with 1 cup of milk, simmered until it coats a spoon. Make it the same volume as your fish, as instructed.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookThe fish is already cooked. Fold it into the hot sauce off the direct heat and serve as soon as it is warmed through — a minute or two. Simmering it will break the flakes into threads and squeeze out moisture, leaving the sauce thin and the fish dry.
- QuantitiesA cup of flaked fish with a cup of sauce feeds two generously over toast, or three as part of a larger plate. Scale by the cup in both directions.
- Nutmeg"A slight grating" means about an eighth of a teaspoon per cup of sauce. It is there to lift the milk, not to be identified on the plate.
- Which fishAny firm cooked white fish works — cod, haddock, halibut, pollock. Oily leftovers such as salmon or mackerel will dominate the cream; smoked fish will need the salt cut back sharply. Pick over the flakes for pin bones and skin before they go in.
- The peasThe recipe asks only for cooked green peas. Frozen peas, dropped in for the last minute, will do; "a few spoonfuls" is about a third of a cup per cup of fish.
- ServingThe recipe names no accompaniment, but the mixture is loose enough to want something under it: buttered toast, a pastry shell, rice or boiled potatoes.
- Leftover fish keepingCooked fish should have been refrigerated promptly and used within two days. Reheat the finished dish through to steaming rather than merely warm.
Cookbooks devoted to using up leftovers were a recognisable category in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when household economy was treated as a moral discipline as much as a budget exercise. The standard rescue was cream sauce: a numbered white sauce kept as a house staple, graded thin, medium or thick, into which almost any cooked protein could be folded. Nutmeg in white sauce is an old habit inherited from English and French practice, where it had long seasoned milk-based dishes. The peas are doing double duty — colour against an otherwise wholly white plate, and a hint that this is a dish rather than a salvage operation.