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Fish Relish
After Marion Harland.
One cup of drawn butter with an egg beaten in, two hard boiled eggs, mashed potato (a cup will do), one cup of cold fish (cod, halibut, or shad), roe of cod or shad, and one teaspoon of butter, one teaspoon of minced parsley, pepper and salt to taste. Method: Dry the roe previously well boiled; mince the fish fine and season ; wash up the roe with the butter and the yolks of the boiled eggs; cut the white into thin rings; put a layer of mashed potatoes at the bottom of a deep buttered dish; then alternate layers of fish; drawn butter with the rings of the whites imbedded in this roe; more potato at top; cover and set in the oven until it smokes and bubbles; brown by removing the cover a few minutes.
Send to table in the baking dish, and pass pickles with it.
A layered fish-and-potato bake built from cooked leftovers, in the mould of a fish pie. The whole thing depends on the drawn butter, which is not melted butter but a thickened sauce, and on the fish already being cooked before it goes in.
- Drawn butterIn nineteenth-century American books drawn butter means a simple flour-thickened butter sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then a cup of hot water or fish stock whisked in and simmered smooth. Beating a raw egg into it off the heat, as here, enriches and sets it during baking. Melted butter alone will separate and leave the dish greasy.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Everything is already cooked, so the goal is simply to heat through and set the egg: roughly 375F, covered, for 25 to 30 minutes, then uncovered until the top colours. "Until it smokes and bubbles" is the original's doneness cue.
- Cooked fish onlyThe cup of "cold fish" is leftover poached or baked cod, halibut or shad, not raw. Likewise the roe must be boiled first, then dried off, before being worked with the butter and cooked egg yolks.
- RoeCod and shad roe were cheap and ordinary in the period and are now seasonal specialities, shad especially so as the fishery has collapsed in most rivers. The dish works without it; the roe layer becomes a thicker seasoned butter layer, or substitute a couple of ounces of any firm cooked roe or fish paste.
- Shad bonesIf you use shad, pick the flesh over carefully. It is one of the boniest fish sold and the bones are fine and sharp; mincing it will not break them down.
- AssemblyRead the run-on middle sentence as: potato, fish, drawn butter with the egg-white rings set into it, roe mixture, then potato on top. The teaspoon of butter is worked into the roe; the parsley is not assigned to any one layer in the original and may go with the seasoned fish or with the roe.
- SeasoningCold cooked fish and plain mashed potato both need more salt than you expect, and the drawn butter is bland by design. Season each layer as it goes in rather than at the end.
- YieldAbout four modest servings as a supper dish. Serve it in the baking dish, and pass pickles with it as directed.
The attribution is to Marion Harland — Mary Virginia Terhune, who wrote under that name and whose Common Sense in the Household (1871) was one of the best-selling American cookbooks of its generation. The "After Marion Harland" line credits her as the source of the recipe as it appears in this Toronto-published collection. The dish itself belongs to the large family of Victorian rechauffés, made to use up the remains of a boiled fish, and its inclusion says something about how central thrift was to respectable housekeeping. Cod and shad roe, treated here as a flavouring almost too ordinary to comment on, was then a by-product of an enormous Atlantic fishery; the shad runs that made it commonplace have since largely disappeared.