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Spiced Fish with White Sauce
Season highly any left-over boiled white fish with one of the following, or a combination: tomato catsup, anchovy, Worcestershire, and a little paprika. Make enough white sauce No. 3 (see page 68) to cover the fish, adding two wellbeaten egg yolks to each cup of sauce. Flake the fish, pour the sauce over and heat in oven.
A leftovers formula rather than a fixed recipe: the quantities are left to the cook, and the only real technique is in the sauce. Two things decide whether it works — the strength of the seasoning and the handling of the egg yolks.
- Temper the yolksBeaten yolks stirred straight into hot sauce will scramble into threads. Whisk a ladle of the hot white sauce into the yolks first, return the mixture to the pan off the heat, and do not let it boil afterwards.
- White sauce No. 3Numbered white sauces in books of this period usually run from thin to thick, so No. 3 is likely the thicker binding sort, but the actual proportions are on page 68 and should be taken from there. Since the yolks thicken it further, err on the looser side or the dish sets solid in the oven.
- "Anchovy"Listed alongside two bottled condiments, this most likely means anchovy essence or anchovy paste. A teaspoon of paste per cup of sauce, mashed in, is about the intended strength; a mashed fillet or two does the same job.
- Season harder than feels right"Season highly" is deliberate. Cold cooked white fish is bland and the flour-and-milk sauce mutes it further, so taste the sauce after the yolks go in and adjust then rather than at the start.
- Oven heat and timeThe recipe gives no oven setting at all, only 'heat in oven'; a moderate oven of about 350F for 15 to 20 minutes will do, since the object is to heat through, not to cook. Reheated fish should reach 165F at the centre.
- Flake carefullyPull the fish apart in large flakes with your fingers and check for pin bones and skin as you go. Shredding it fine turns the finished dish into a paste.
- YieldTwo cups of flaked fish and two cups of sauce serve four, in a shallow dish so the surface browns lightly rather than steaming.
Books of "left-overs" were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, aimed at middle-class households that had cooked whole fish or joints of meat and now had to account for the remainder. Boiled white fish — cod, haddock, halibut — was a standard plain dinner, and it reheats badly on its own, so the standard rescue was to flake it, drown it in a rich sauce and call it something else. The seasonings named here are all bottled commercial products of the era: tomato catsup, Worcestershire and anchovy essence were the pantry shortcuts that gave a cook depth of flavour without stock or long reduction, and paprika, often said to have been sold then as a mild colouring spice, supplied the tint. The enriched white sauce, thickened with butter, flour and egg yolks, was a staple of the cooking-school kitchens of the period.