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Seasoning
2 tablespoonfuls butter Cook eggs hard, or if any soft-cooked ones are left from breakfast steam them until hard. Carefully take out the bones from the fish and chop it up with the eggs. Reheat cooked rice, having it a little moist. When it is very hot put in the fish, eggs, and butter, and heat all up together. Add paprika, salt if necessary, and serve very hot.
Smoked haddock or white fish recommended for this dish.
Fish Mélange 1 cup cold boiled fish (cod, halibut, salmon, etc.) 2 cups riced potato
This is essentially a kedgeree, and the page as printed is a fragment: the ingredient list has been cut off at the top and the beginning of the next recipe (Fish Mélange) has run on at the end. Work from the method, which is complete enough to follow.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the butter survives from the ingredient list. Judging by the method and comparable recipes of the period, figure roughly 1 cup flaked cooked fish, 2 cups cooked rice and 2 to 3 hard-cooked eggs to the 2 tablespoons butter. Treat those as a reconstruction, not the author's own numbers.
- Where the recipe ends"Fish Mélange, 1 cup cold boiled fish (cod, halibut, salmon, etc.), 2 cups riced potato" belongs to the following recipe and has nothing to do with this one. Stop at "Smoked haddock or white fish recommended."
- The hinge: moist riceEverything depends on the instruction to reheat the rice "a little moist." Cold cooked rice reheated dry turns to gravel and the dish will be sawdust. Add a few tablespoons of water or milk, cover, and steam it soft before anything else goes in.
- Reheating leftover fishCooked fish that has been refrigerated should be no more than a day or two old and should come back up to steaming hot throughout — the recipe's "serve very hot" is doing real work here. Fold it in at the end and give it only a minute or two; long reheating shreds it to threads.
- Smoked haddockMost likely finnan haddie or something like it, cold-smoked and lightly cured, a common breakfast fish at the time; what is sold today as smoked haddock is often dyed yellow, and undyed is probably closer to what was meant. If starting from raw smoked haddock rather than a leftover, poach it in milk first and drain well, or the dish turns salty.
- "Cook eggs hard"Hard-cooked, not boiled hard: eggs brought to a boil, covered off the heat about ten minutes, then cooled. The alternative given — steaming leftover soft-cooked eggs until firm — works but the whites will be rubbery.
- Salt and paprikaThe "salt if necessary" is deliberate. Smoked haddock carries a great deal of its own, so season only after tasting the assembled dish. Paprika in an American kitchen of this sort would have meant the mild sweet kind, used as much for colour as for heat.
- YieldAs reconstructed, a supper for three or four, or breakfast for two. It does not hold; serve it straight from the pan.
Fish, rice and hard-cooked egg heated together in butter is kedgeree, an Anglo-Indian dish generally traced to the Hindi khichri, a rice-and-lentil preparation that British households in India reworked with fish and eggs and carried home. By the late nineteenth century it had settled onto the British breakfast sideboard, and smoked haddock — finnan haddie — became its usual fish, which is exactly what this recipe recommends. The emphasis on using things up is telling: kedgeree had always been a way of using yesterday's cooked fish and yesterday's boiled rice, and American economy cookery seized on dishes that turned two remainders and a couple of eggs into a hot meal without naming themselves as scraps.