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Pulled Fish
Boiled fish 1 1/2 pint (1 cup) cream 1 tablespoonful dry mustard 1/2 tablespoonfuls mushroom catchup Pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful flour 1 tablespoonful anchovy essence 1 teaspoonful butter Toasted bread After any solid fish is boiled, pick it in small pieces from the bones and add to one pound of it the mustard, anchovy essence, catchup, pepper, flour, butter and cream; heat over the fire until very hot and serve at once on toast.
I good-sized boiled lobster 6 ozs. (3/4 cup) sweet butter 1 tablespoonful chopped onion 1 tablespoonful chopped peppers AJI 6 peeled tomatoes 16 potatoes 5 hard-cooked eggs 1 pint (2 cups) chicken stock I small cream cheese Salt to taste Slice the tomatoes; cut each potato in three pieces and the eggs in quarters. Melt the but-
A Victorian-style savoury for using up cold boiled fish, brought back to the table in a sharp mustard-anchovy cream. Note that the typesetting has run a second, unrelated lobster dish into the same block; everything from "1 good-sized boiled lobster" onward belongs to another recipe and is cut off mid-sentence.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerCream, flour and butter with a pound of already-cooked fish need only to come up to serving heat. Boil it and the fish shreds go stringy and the cream can break; two or three minutes over moderate heat is enough, which is why the original says "serve at once."
- "Pulled" means pulledPick the cooked fish off the bone in flakes with your fingers rather than chopping it. The dish depends on ragged strands holding the sauce; a knife gives you cubes that sit in it instead.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty Victorian bottled seasoning, still sold in Britain. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or two mashed oil-packed anchovy fillets, does the same job. Salt only after this goes in.
- Mushroom catchupNot tomato ketchup. The original is a dark, thin, salted mushroom liquor closer to soy sauce or Worcestershire; either of those, or a mushroom ketchup if you can find it, is the right substitution. "1/2 tablespoonfuls" is garbled in the printing; the plural suggests 1 1/2 tablespoons, though a plain half tablespoon is possible — go lighter if you are using soy.
- MeasuresHalf a pint here is the American 1 cup, as the recipe itself glosses. Dry mustard means mustard powder; a full tablespoon is assertive, which is the point, but half that suits many modern palates.
- Which fish"Any solid fish" means firm-fleshed and non-oily — cod, haddock, halibut, hake. Salmon and mackerel fight the mustard and anchovy; delicate sole falls to mush.
- ThickeningA single teaspoon of flour into a cup of cream gives a barely-bound sauce, not a béchamel. Work it into the softened butter first so it does not sit in lumps in the cream.
- Yield and toastA pound of picked fish serves four as a lunch or supper dish, two if it is the whole meal. Toast the bread dry and firm and spoon the fish on at the last moment, or it goes sodden underneath.
Pulled fish belongs to the long English tradition of the savoury — a hot, sharply seasoned mouthful on toast, served at the end of dinner or, more practically, made from yesterday's boiled fish for breakfast or supper. The two flavourings that carry it, anchovy essence and mushroom catchup, were the standard bottled seasonings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kitchens, both of them intensely salty umami liquors used much as cooks now use soy sauce or Worcestershire; mushroom ketchup in particular predates the tomato version in English use. "Pulled" is the same word applied to pulled chicken and pulled pork: flesh shredded from the bone rather than carved.