Fish Pie: or, Never underestimate potatoes and cheese

Anyone care for fish?

Fish Pie 3 tbsp. minced or dried parsley 1½ cups white sauce (from your recipe or mix of choice, or see below) 3 cups mashed potatoes 2 cups cooked, flaked fish 1 to 1½ cups grated cheese (I used Gouda) Heat oven to 425°. Mix the parsley into the white sauce, set aside. Chop or break the fish into small pieces. Grease a 9" square baking dish and line it with mashed potatoes. Make the potatoes come up about half an inch above the edge of the pan if you have enough to do it easily. Sprinkle half of the fish into the potatoes. Pour half the white sauce over the fish. Then sprinkle with half of the cheese. Repeat the layers with the remaining ingredients: fish, then sauce, then cheese on top. Bake for twenty minutes or until the cheese is browned. Leftover fish of all kinds can be used in this recipe. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Standard White Sauce 4½ tsp butter (aka 1½ tbsp) 4½ tsp flour 1½ cups milk ½ tsp salt Scald the milk and set aside. (This is easiest if you put it in a microwave-safe measuring cup, pop it in the microwave, and then let it cook until it just starts to bubble.) Melt butter in a saucepan or small skillet. Add flour, salt, and pepper; mix well. Add the milk one small splash at a time, beating very hard with each addition. The butter and flour will "seize  up" the first few times; beat out any lumps. After all the milk is added, bring to the boil, reduce heat, and simmer two minutes. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book again!

I really like pre-breaded frozen fish fillets when no one is around to whine about the smell. They're like fish sticks (or, as I hear they delightfully call them in the UK, fish fingers) but with slightly more dignity.

Pre-breaded fillets also mean I don't have to try to competently cook fish. Fish is the least forgiving of all meats. Dry chicken is passable even if no one likes it, miscooked beef is a still-edible disappointment, but badly cooked fish cannot be salvaged or choked down. But anyone can put frozen chunks of pre-breaded fish on an oven rack and set a timer.

I could have baked the fillets one dinner at a time, but I decided to cook the entire package (it was a small one) and make a fish pie the next day. 

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

I love how basic this recipe is, right down to the last sentence: "Left-over fish of all kinds can be used in this recipe." Mrs. Mary Martensen's recipes have such a realistic aspect to them. She and her staff knew that no one had the time for carving radish roses or the money to throw out last night's dinner with a depression on.  

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book

Because this recipe is clearly meant to economize, I figured Mrs. Mary Martensen wouldn't mind if I used dried parsley instead of paying for fresh. Besides, this cookbook came out during the Depression. Few people had the means to side-eye economization. I didn't expect the parsley to make our white sauce look like I was making the brownies of sin.

We're told to line a pan with mashed potatoes, "allowing the potatoes to come about one-half inch above the dish on the sides." I imagine this is so that you get a lot of crispy potatoes on the rim of the pie. Since I halved the recipe, I would have needed to get the potatoes about as thin as a pie crust. And I think we can all agree that trying to use a rolling pin on mashed potatoes is not worth the unrepeatable language that would ensue.

And now, as Mrs. Mary Martensen promised, here is the leftover fish!

This recipe both was and wasn't quick to make. On one hand, it is just a creative assembly of fish, potatoes, and white sauce (with some cheese to make it all better, of course). On the other hand, mashed potatoes and white sauce both put a lot of dirty dishes in the sink.

I'm not surprised this was good. I'm pretty sure you can put almost any protein in this and it would be delicious. (Imagine it with mushrooms...) The parsley sauce did wonders for the fish underneath it. I don't mean the parsley hid the fishy taste-- instead, it somehow made it work with everything else.

In full disclosure, we didn't always get nice slices of this pie. Some portions came out looking like messy glop.

Now, fish is somewhat infamous for befouling microwaves. This pie didn't make the kitchen air unbearable, but it did smell just as strong in the microwave as when it was in the oven. So I wouldn't reheat this in a breakroom (or any other shared microwave), but it's fine to reheat at home.

In closing, this is a lot better than I expected it to be. A lot of times, those leftover-based recipes are a bit underwhelming in a practical-minded way. But this was just plain (very plain) good.