Home › Left-Over Fish › Fish with Pie Crust
Fish with Pie Crust
Line a baking-tin with a good pastry crust and bake it. Remove all bones and skin from any cold boiled white fish and flake it. There should be two cups; if not, fill out with a few raw oysters.
Season as needed with salt and pepper. Make quite moist with drawn butter sauce (see page 70), or white sauce No. 2 (see page 68), reserving enough sauce to cover top. Spread the mixture on the baked crust. Cover with a layer of thin slices of hard-cooked eggs, season with salt and pepper, and pour over the remaining sauce.
Sprinkle with buttered crumbs and brown in hot oven.
A leftover-fish gratin built on a pre-baked pastry base rather than under a top crust. The whole thing depends on the sauce being thick enough to bind but loose enough to keep the fish from drying out in the final blast of heat.
- Blind-bake properlyThe crust is baked fully before filling, since the finished dish only goes back in long enough to brown. Line and weight it, bake at 400F until the base is dry and coloured, or the sauce will soak it grey.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period the term is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Give it only long enough to heat the filling through and colour the crumbs, on the order of 10-15 minutes; longer and the pastry edge burns.
- Drawn butter sauceNot clarified butter. In American books of this period it is a light flour-and-butter sauce made with water or fish stock rather than milk -- roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of liquid, finished with more butter.
- White sauce No. 2In numbered schemes of this kind No. 2 is generally the medium-thick sauce, commonly about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour per cup of milk; the book's own page 68 gives the proportions actually intended. It should coat a spoon but still pour.
- The raw oystersThey are filler for a shortfall of fish, and the brief browning may not cook them through in the middle of a cold filling. Poach them in their own liquor for a minute first, or leave them out and make up the volume with more fish.
- Which fish"Cold boiled white fish" means cod, haddock, halibut, hake -- anything firm and lean. Oily fish such as salmon or mackerel will dominate the sauce. Flake it in reasonably large pieces so it does not turn to paste.
- Reheating leftoversCooked fish that has been refrigerated should be brought right through to steaming, not merely warmed. Have the filling and sauce at room temperature or warmer going into the oven so the centre catches up with the crumbs.
- Buttered crumbsFresh breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, about 2 tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs. Dry packaged crumbs scorch before they brown.
- YieldTwo cups of fish and a standard tin serve four as a main course. Cut it in squares and lift with a wide spatula; the crust is not sturdy once sauced.
Books of "left overs" were a small publishing genre in the United States between roughly 1890 and 1920, when household economy was treated as a technical skill and the icebox made it plausible to keep cooked fish overnight. The structure here -- a sauce, a bound filling, hard-cooked eggs, buttered crumbs -- is the standard grammar of the period's reheated dishes, and the cross-references to numbered sauces on pages 68 and 70 show how these manuals worked: a handful of mother sauces learned once, then applied to whatever the previous day's dinner left behind. Egg slices with white fish is an old pairing in English and American cookery, common in fish pies and in kedgeree, and it does real work here, adding richness to lean fish that has already given up its juices to the boiling pot. The inverted construction, with the pastry baked first and the filling piled on top, sidesteps the problem that a soggy bottom crust would ruin an otherwise thrifty dish.