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Fish Pies and Puddings
HS Cornish Fish Pie. (Mrs. Juliet Backhouse, Trebah. 1881.) A good bass makes the best pie (bass is also called "sea-perch"), but grey mullet is also excellent, and even mackerel is used sometimes. The fish is of course cleaned as for dressing, and then cut across in pieces about 3 or 4 inches square. Boil the bones for stock, and strain.
Pack the pieces closely in the dish, season with pepper and salt, and sprinkle in a little chopped parsley leaf here and there.
Add a tablespoonful of the fish stock for a small pie (2 for a larger one). Cover with a crust which must not be too rich. Bake till nearly ready - then, through the ornamental "rose" hole at top of pie, pour in a teacupful of warmed cream and finish baking. It is usual also to add a little "scalded cream" just as the pie is going to table thus the cream would lie at the top of the fish. It is best to lift the crust to put in the scalded cream, but should this be done, less "raw cream" would be required at first start. "Crab Pie." (Mrs. Young.) See Appendix as to boiling Crabs.
Boil it in boiling water, pick out all the flesh of claws and body, and clean the shell nicely. Take half a teacupful of bread - crumbs, a little salt, pepper, and fresh butter; add the crab-meat, and mix all well together and replace in shell; cover with more bread-crumbs and put tiny specks of butter here and there on the top. Brown before the fire - about 20 minutes will do it. Fish Pudding. No. 1. For Luncheon.
This pudding is made from the fish that has been dressed for dinner day before such as codfish, turbot or salmon - white fish makes the prettiest dish. Boil ½ teacupful of rice in milk till very tender and very stiff. Mix with the rice ¼ lb. of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of essence of shrimp, or of anchovy if essence of shrimp cannot be procured, a little salt, white pepper and cayenne. Pull the fish in pieces and mix what proportion you please with the rice. Have a plain mould ready, well buttered, put a few browned bread - crumbs round the inside of the mould before you put the pudding in. This pudding will take 1 hour to boil - turn it out on a dish. Send it to table quite hot. Serve with Shrimp Sauce. See Sauces for Fish.
Another copy says: "We make it with ½ cupful of cream, 2 yolks of egg, and 1 white, previously beaten, and 1 teaspoonful of essence of shrimps." Fish Pudding. No. 2 - Findon Haddock. (Isa. Emslie. 1889.) A luncheon "make out."
Soak the fish 1 hour in cold water, drain them, then put them on again in cold water to come to the boil, and boil for 10 minutes; then drain them again.
Four separate dishes collected under one heading, in the shorthand of a cook writing for other cooks. The Cornish pie is the substantial one; the last entry breaks off mid-method and cannot be completed from what is printed here.
- The cream is the point of the Cornish pieIt goes in through the vent hole near the end rather than at the start, which will also have kept it from splitting or boiling out under the crust. The "scalded cream" added just before the pie goes to table is the Cornish clotted style — cream heated gently until a crust forms, then cooled; ordinary clotted cream from a tub is the closest equivalent.
- Teacupful and gillTeacupful -- A Victorian teacupful is usually reckoned at about 5 to 6 fl oz, but it was never a fixed measure and Lady Clark's contributors used it loosely. For the pie, take the teacupful of warmed cream as roughly 5 to 6 fl oz.
- Oven for the pieThe text gives no temperature or time, only "bake till nearly ready." If you want modern figures, something in the region of 425F for 15 to 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then 350F to finish, will suit it. "A crust which must not be too rich" probably points to a plain shortcrust rather than puff or a butter-heavy paste.
- Bass and grey mulletThe bass named here is European sea bass, sold as sea perch in the period. Any firm white fish on the bone works; the 3 to 4 inch cross-cut pieces are steaks, which hold together far better than fillets during the bake. Mackerel, as the recipe concedes, makes a much oilier pie.
- "Brown before the fire"This means an open fire or a salamander, and 20 minutes is a reflection of how weak that heat could be. Under a modern grill or broiler the crumbed crab shells need 5 to 8 minutes, watched, since the meat is already cooked and only wants heating and colour.
- Essence of shrimpA commercial flavouring bottle now effectively gone from shops. Anchovy essence, which the recipe itself offers as the substitute, is still made; the recipe asks for 2 tablespoonfuls, though you may want less, or Asian shrimp paste thinned with a little water. Season afterwards, as both are very salty.
- Boiling the puddingA buttered mould, crumbed, then covered tightly with buttered paper and foil and set in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up — an hour at a steady simmer. Use fish cooked the day before but keep it refrigerated and bring the pudding to piping hot right through, not merely warm.
- Findon haddockFindon (Finnan) haddie is cold-smoked and heavily salted, hence the hour's soak. Modern smoked haddock is far less salty; 15 to 20 minutes' soak is ample, and 10 minutes at a bare simmer will overcook a thin fillet — 4 to 5 minutes is closer.
- The last recipe is incompleteFish Pudding No. 2 stops after the fish is drained. Nothing in the text tells you what binds or moulds it; treat the No. 1 method above as the model if you want to finish it.
- YieldNo dish size or number of servings is given; the recipe only distinguishes a small pie from a larger one. As a rough guide, one dressed crab shell will serve one as a first course, and the rice pudding mould is a luncheon dish for several.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie kept her recipes as a working archive rather than a book, noting the name and often the year beside each — Mrs Juliet Backhouse of Trebah in 1881, Isa Emslie in 1889 — and the collection was only edited and published after her death, by Catherine Frere in 1909. The result is a snapshot of what circulated between country houses, which is why a Cornish pie from a Falmouth-area garden estate sits a few lines from a Findon haddock pudding out of the north-east of Scotland. The Cornish pie belongs to a wide family of West Country fish pies finished with the local clotted cream; the cream added twice, once raw through the vent and once scalded at the table, is at least what this one recipe asks for. The fish puddings are frankly leftovers work — "a luncheon make out", in Isa Emslie's phrase — and show the calculation behind a large kitchen, where yesterday's dinner turbot was expected to reappear the next day moulded, sauced and unrecognisable.