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Scalloped Flaked Cod or Other Fish
1/4 pound flaked cod 1½ cups of white sauce 1½ cups mashed potato 1 cup buttered crumbs Arrange the fish and sauce in layers in a well-greased baking dish. Cover with mashed potatoes and bread crumbs. Bake until heated throughout and crumbs are browned on top. Any kind of cooked fish may be flaked and prepared in this way. Layers of boiled onion or green peas may be used in this recipe.
A pantry assembly rather than a cooked dish: every element goes into the dish already cooked, so the oven only heats and browns. That fact governs the timing.
- "Flaked cod"This may mean boxed shredded salt codfish, sold dry and needing to be freshened in several changes of cool water before use. But the recipe's own closing line, that any cooked fish may be flaked and prepared this way, points to fresh or leftover cooked cod flaked off the bone, which is the simpler reading and works equally well.
- SaltIf you use salt cod, soak it until a poached shred tastes pleasantly seasoned rather than briny, and leave the salt out of the white sauce until you have tasted the assembled layers.
- White sauceA medium white sauce: 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups milk, cooked until it coats the spoon. Thinner than that and the layers will slump when cut.
- Buttered crumbsOne cup of soft fresh breadcrumbs tossed with 2 to 3 tablespoons melted butter. Dry commercial crumbs absorb less and brown darker; use rather less butter and watch the top.
- Oven and timeThe original gives none. 400F for 25 to 30 minutes brings a room-temperature dish through and colours the crumbs; add 10 minutes if it has been assembled and refrigerated.
- The hingeThe fish is already cooked, so the only risk is overbaking, which dries the flakes and breaks the sauce. Pull it as soon as the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are golden.
- Potato as a lidSpread or pipe the mashed potato to the edges of the dish so it seals the filling; leave it rough on top and the ridges catch colour under the crumbs.
- YieldA pound of fish in a 1½-quart dish serves four as a main course, five or six if onions or peas are layered in as suggested.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the free booklets that Metropolitan Life Insurance distributed to policyholders in the early twentieth century, part of a wider corporate-welfare habit of teaching nutrition and thrift to working households alongside selling them insurance. That purpose shows in this recipe: it is built almost entirely from leftovers and cheap staples, and its real subject is the closing line, that any cooked fish will do. Scalloped dishes of this kind, bound with a flour-and-milk sauce and capped with crumbs, were the standard American answer to a small quantity of anything; boxed shredded salt codfish, kept dry on the shelf and freshened as needed, was a cupboard fixture in the Northeast well into the twentieth century, and a potato-topped fish pie of some form is common to most of the cod-fishing coasts of the North Atlantic.