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Fish with Mushrooms
1 cup fish 1 tablespoonful chop- 1 cup white sauce No. 2 (see page 68) ped onion 1 cups button mushrooms 1 tablespoonful butter 2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese Baked or boiled fish can be used. Flake the fish, cut the mushrooms in halves and cook until tender (canned ones may be used). Brown the onion lightly in the butter and add fish, white sauce, and mushrooms. Place in ramekins, cover top with grated cheese, and heat in oven until cheese melts.
A tidy ramekin dish built on a cup of cooked fish and a medium white sauce. The whole point is reheating, not cooking, so everything hinges on how briefly it sits in the oven.
- White sauce No. 2Numbered sauces in books of this period usually run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely the medium one: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. The page 68 recipe would settle it. Season it properly with salt and pepper, since the fish brings little of its own.
- MushroomsThe quantity was checked against the printed page and matches what our text gives. A cup or so of halved mushrooms to a cup of fish keeps the two in balance; canned ones do fine.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature: "heat in oven until cheese melts" means a brief spell in a hot oven, judged by eye rather than by the clock, since everything in the ramekin is already cooked and hot.
- Don't cook the fish twiceThe fish is already cooked. The recipe adds it to the pan with the sauce and mushrooms, so keep that stage short and handle the flakes as little as possible so they stay flakes rather than turning to paste.
- Fresh mushroomsSauté them in a dry-ish pan until their liquid has evaporated and they have taken a little colour. Canned mushrooms, as the recipe allows, should be drained and blotted or they will thin the sauce in the oven.
- CheeseA dry aged cheese melts and browns better than anything soft. Grated Parmesan or a firm Cheddar, and a light hand, since the sauce is already rich.
- Ramekins and yieldThis fills two generous or three small ramekins, enough for a light supper or a first course. It can equally go into one small gratin dish, in which case give it a few minutes longer.
- Leftover fishUse fish that has been refrigerated since it was cooked and use it within a day or two. Reheat it right through to steaming, not merely until the cheese has slumped.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to "left overs" were a recognisable genre in the early twentieth century, when cold storage was unreliable or absent in many households and thrift was framed as a domestic virtue rather than a mere economy. This dish is the standard formula of the genre: flake the remains, bind them in white sauce, put them in individual ramekins, and crown them with cheese so that what arrives at the table looks composed rather than salvaged. White sauce numbered by thickness — thin for soups, medium for creamed dishes, thick for croquettes — was associated with the domestic science movement, which drilled cooks in a handful of base preparations rather than in individual recipes. Button mushrooms in cans made this sort of dish possible year-round, and the recipe's casual permission to use them suggests tinned goods were by then unremarkable in kitchens of this sort.