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Fish with Bread Crumbs
(Pesce col pane grattato) This, which can also be served as a side-dish, is made especially when you have boiled fish of good quality left over.
Cut it into little pieces, remove carefully all the bones, then put it in the balsamella (No. 54) and season with enough salt, grated cheese and some mushrooms chopped fine. If dried mushsoften in water first. Then take a fireproof plate, grease it evenly with butter and dust with bread crumbs ground fine; pour into it the fish prepared as above and cover with a thin layer of bread crumbs. Finally put over a piece of butter, brown in the oven and serve hot. 116
A leftovers gratin that depends almost entirely on the sauce, so the balsamella is where the attention should go. The original text has a printer's error — "If dried mush" should read "if dried mushrooms, soften them in water first."
- BalsamellaThis is béchamel: butter and flour cooked together, then whisked with milk until it coats a spoon. Make it on the thick side, since the fish and mushrooms will loosen it, and cool it slightly before folding in the fish so the flakes hold their shape.
- Fireproof plateAny shallow gratin or baking dish, earthenware or enamelled cast iron, roughly 8 by 10 inches for a pound of cooked fish. The shallowness matters — the point is maximum browned surface, not depth.
- OvenBrowning, not baking. 400–425F for 15–20 minutes will set the interior and colour the top; a minute or two under the broiler at the end finishes it if the crumbs are still pale.
- Bread crumbs"Ground fine" means dry crumbs from stale bread, closer to modern plain crumbs than to panko. The dish is crumbed twice — buttered and dusted underneath so it releases, and topped for the crust.
- Grated cheeseMost likely Parmesan, the usual grated cheese in books of this kind, and a moderate hand: two or three tablespoons for a pound of fish, enough to season the sauce without overwhelming the fish.
- The fishAny firm boiled or poached white fish, cod, halibut, hake or the like. Pick over it twice for bones, as the recipe insists — once the pieces are buried in sauce nothing else will catch them. Leftover fish should have been refrigerated promptly and used within two days.
- MushroomsFresh mushrooms should be chopped and sautéed dry until their water has gone, or they will thin the sauce. Dried porcini need 20 minutes in warm water; the strained soaking liquid is worth adding to the béchamel in place of some of the milk.
- YieldA pound of cooked fish with about two cups of balsamella serves four as a light main course, or six as the side-dish the author mentions.
This comes from The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, whose numbered cross-references and household economy are often said to owe a debt to Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene — the standard Italian domestic manual of the era, which likewise sends the reader back to a numbered balsamella. The dish itself is less an Italian invention than a universal solution to the problem of yesterday's boiled fish: bind it in a white sauce, crumb it, brown it. The name balsamella is the Italianised form of béchamel, and the sauce is traditionally said to have been carried into France by Tuscan cooks — a claim repeated in Italian kitchens and impossible to document either way.