Home › Breakfast Dishes › Curry of Fish
Curry of Fish
Cold boiled or baked fish is a luxury when warmed up in a curry sauce. Put into the chafing dish proper a tablespoonful butter, a teaspoonful of chopped onion, and brown the latter. Add a teaspoonful of curry powder, half pint of white soup broth; simmer five minutes, add a pound of cold fish and serve.
A chafing-dish breakfast dish built to use up yesterday's fish. The whole thing takes under ten minutes, and the only real risk is overworking the fish.
- The hinge: add the fish last and barely heat itCold cooked fish is already fully cooked; it needs only two or three minutes in the hot sauce to warm through. Fold it in off the boil and stir as little as possible or it will shred into fibres.
- "Chafing dish proper"The upper pan (the blazer), set directly over the flame, as opposed to the hot-water pan that can be placed beneath it. Any small skillet or saucepan over medium heat does the same job.
- Half pintOne cup, 240 ml. Enough to coat a pound of fish rather than to make a soup.
- White soup brothA pale unthickened stock, veal or chicken, sometimes with a little cream. Use a light chicken or fish stock; avoid dark beef broth, which will overwhelm the dish.
- Cook the curry powderThe recipe gives it no time before the liquid goes in. Let the powder fry in the butter for about thirty seconds until it smells toasted, which removes the raw, chalky edge of older-style commercial blends.
- ConsistencyA cup of plain broth stays thin. If you want the sauce to cling, stir a scant teaspoon of flour into the butter with the curry powder, or reduce the broth by a third before the fish goes in.
- Which fishFirm leftovers hold up best: cod, halibut, haddock, salmon. Flake into large pieces and remove skin and bones first, since neither will be found in the sauce once it is served.
- Yield and servingA pound of fish serves three to four at breakfast. Serve over rice or on buttered toast; a squeeze of lemon at the table compensates for the mildness of the sauce.
Curried fish at breakfast is a direct inheritance from Anglo-Indian households, the same current that produced kedgeree, and it reached American cookbooks through British table habits rather than through any Indian source. Commercial curry powder — pre-blended spice mixtures were not a British invention, though their tinned commercialisation was, with British firms selling it from the late eighteenth century in a variety of competing formulas — made the dish possible for a cook who had never encountered the spices separately. If it appears among breakfast dishes, that says as much about thrift as about taste: an entire genre of turn-of-the-century recipes exists to move cold cooked fish, meat and potatoes onto the next morning's table, and a spiced sauce was the most efficient way to make yesterday's boiled cod read as something new. The chafing dish, then fashionable for informal entertaining and late suppers, let the whole operation happen at the table.