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Kedjeree
1 cup left-over smoked 1 scant cup cooked fish 1 scant cup cooked rice 2 hard-cooked eggs
The page as printed is only the ingredient column — the method column has been lost, and one line breaks off mid-phrase ("1 cup left-over smoked" — almost certainly smoked fish, listed separately from the plain cooked fish). What follows is what a cook needs to reconstruct it in the standard way.
- What the amounts add up toRoughly equal volumes of smoked fish, plain cooked fish and cooked rice, with two hard-cooked eggs. That comes to about three cups of mixture, or two to three servings. "Scant" means just under a level cup.
- The missing methodKedgeree of this period is usually warmed rather than baked: flake the fish free of skin and bone, fold it into the rice with a few tablespoons of butter and a little cream or milk over low heat, and stop as soon as it is hot through. The whites are commonly chopped in and the yolks sieved over the top, or the eggs simply quartered as a garnish.
- The hingeHeat gently and stir as little as possible. Aggressive stirring turns the rice to paste and shreds the fish into fibres; the dish should stay loose and distinct.
- Smoked fish then and now'Smoked' in an American book of this kind would most often have been finnan haddie or smoked halibut — firm, salty, cold-smoked. Modern hot-smoked salmon or trout will work but is oilier and much saltier, so taste before adding any salt at all.
- SeasoningNo curry powder appears in the surviving ingredient list, though the lost method column may have called for some. A teaspoon of mild curry powder bloomed in the butter first, plus cayenne, lemon juice and pepper, gives the British hotel version if that is what you want.
- RiceThe recipe assumes yesterday's boiled rice, cold and dry. Cold rice is genuinely better here; freshly cooked rice is too moist and clumps.
- Reheating leftoversCooked fish that has been refrigerated should be brought fully hot in one go and not held warm on the stove. Reheat once only.
Kedgeree descends from khichri, the Indian dish of rice and pulses, which British households in India adapted by replacing the lentils with fish and hard-boiled egg; it came home in the nineteenth century as a breakfast and supper dish and appears in English cookery books under a variety of spellings — kedgeree, kegeree, kitchri, and here "kedjeree." Its place in a book of left-overs is exact rather than incidental: the dish exists to use up cold cooked fish and cold cooked rice, two things a household that boiled its own rice and bought whole fish had constantly on hand.