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Cod and Oyster Pie
(England.) Flake and remove the bones from cold cooked fresh fish, add to each cupful 6 oysters, 1/2 cup of stock, mixed with a tablespoonful of oyster juice. Season to taste, pour into a dish and bake, with a thin crust of paste on top, or a layer of mashed potatoes.
A frugal English supper dish built from leftover boiled cod, given in the shorthand of a book that assumed you already had cooked fish in the larder. The proportions are per cupful of flaked fish, so scale as needed.
- The hinge: don't overcook the oystersThe oysters go in raw and finish in the oven, needing only the time it takes the pie to heat through and brown; as a modern working guide, roughly 20-25 minutes at 400F. Left longer they shrink and toughen.
- "Paste" means pastryA thin crust of paste is short or puff pastry rolled thin and laid over the top, not a batter. Cut a vent, and brush with beaten egg or milk if you want colour.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies none. In a modern oven, a pastry lid wants 400-425F so the crust sets and colours; a mashed potato top will do at 375-400F, or can be browned briefly under the broiler.
- Stock and oyster juiceFish or light chicken stock; the tablespoon of oyster liquor per cup is what makes the filling taste of the sea. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve to catch grit and shell.
- QuantitiesHalf a cup of stock per cup of fish gives a loose, saucy filling that will bubble up. If you want it to hold when cut, reduce the liquid slightly or bind it with a spoonful of thick white sauce.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves it open. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or mace and a little lemon are all plausible for a dish of this kind, as are chopped parsley and a knob of butter over the fish before the crust goes on.
- Fish choiceAny firm cooked white fish works: cod, haddock, hake, pollock. Pick the bones out carefully, since cold flaked cod hides small ones.
- YieldTwo cups of flaked fish with a dozen oysters fills a small pie dish and serves two to three as a main course.
Cod and oysters together look extravagant now, but for much of the nineteenth century oysters were the cheap part of the plate: beds along the Kent and Essex coasts, and in America the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound, supplied them by the barrel, and they were used the way a modern cook uses stock or anchovy, to give body and salinity to something plain. By the 1880s, though, those beds were badly depleted, and oysters ceased to be the cheap option. Fish pie under a pastry lid or a potato crust is the standard English answer to yesterday's boiled fish. That this appears in a collection organised by country, labelled simply "(England.)", tells you what such books were for: readers wanted national dishes catalogued side by side, and the compiler pared each one down to the few lines a competent cook would need.