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Cassolettes of Fish
2 lb. cold cooked fish or shrimps 4 tablespoonfuls flour Salt, pepper, and red pepper ½ cupful milk to taste 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco ½ cupful water 2 tablespoonfuls cream 1 teaspoonful lemon juice ½ lbs. cooked potatoes 2 eggs Rub potatoes through a sieve, add little salt and pepper, 1 egg well beaten, and 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco and mix well. Roll out on floured baking board to 144 inches in thickness. Cut into small rounds, brush over with remaining egg well beaten, toss in fine breadcrumbs, mark the center slightly with a smaller round cutter. Fry to golden color in hot Crisco. Remove lids, carefully remove bulk of potatoes from inside, fill with mixture, replace lids, and serve hot. For mixture, blend 2 tablespoonfuls of the Crisco with flour in a saucepan over the fire, add milk, water and seasonings and cook for a few minutes. Put in flaked fish and make hot. Add cream last. 1/2 teaspoonful of anchovy extract may be added if liked.
Sufficient for ten cassolettes.
A Crisco-era version of a classic potato-crust savoury: fried duchesse-potato cases filled with creamed fish. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredient list and the method run in parallel columns and need untangling before you start.
- The hinge: dry the potatoThe cases hold their shape only if the sieved potato is stiff and dry. Bake or steam the potatoes rather than boiling them, and if they seem damp, dry the mash over low heat for a minute or two before adding the egg and fat.
- Thickness of the rolled potatoThe stated thickness ('144 inches') is a garbled fraction; the underlying figure was most likely 1/4 inch, though for a case deep enough to hollow out after frying it is worth rolling nearer 1/2 inch. Anything very thin will collapse when you lift the lid.
- CriscoStraight hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still workable here. Butter in the potato and a neutral oil for frying give the same result with better flavour.
- Frying temperatureDeep fry at 350-360F. Hotter and the crumb coat darkens before the potato heats through; cooler and the cases drink fat.
- The sauce quantitiesThe method sends 2 of the 4 tablespoonfuls of Crisco into the potato and the other 2 into the sauce, but all 4 tablespoonfuls of flour go into the sauce, and 1 1/2 cupful milk plus 1 1/2 cupful water is far more liquid than that will thicken to a filling. Scale the liquid down -- 2 tablespoonfuls fat, 2 of flour and about a cup of milk and water combined -- thick enough to sit in a potato case without running.
- Cream and lemonThe recipe says only to add the cream last; take the pan off the heat first so the sauce does not split. The lemon juice appears in the ingredients but never in the method; stir it in with the cream, a teaspoon at most.
- Anchovy extractThe optional half-teaspoonful is anchovy essence, a thin salty liquid sold alongside Worcestershire sauce. A little anchovy paste or a dash of fish sauce does the same work; season the sauce afterwards, not before.
- Yield and servingTen cassolettes, enough for five as a first course or four or five as a light supper with a green salad. They must go to the table hot; the potato firms up and the filling stiffens within minutes.
Cassolette is generally traced to the French diminutive for a small covered pot, though the word has carried other senses too, including that of a perfume-burner; in culinary use it came to mean any individual savoury served in a little case with a lid, whether that case was pastry, bread or, as here, fried potato. The technique is duchesse potato, sieved potato bound with egg yolk and fat, pushed one step further: shaped, crumbed, fried and hollowed. Recipes of this kind gave cooks a way to serve leftover boiled fish as something that looked designed rather than salvaged, which is exactly why the dish sits in a promotional cookbook of this period. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter and Gamble in the 1910s to teach American households what to do with a wholly new product, a solid vegetable shortening that behaved like lard but came from cottonseed oil. Here it appears three times over: creamed into the potato, whisked into the sauce, and heated for the deep fat.