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Baked Black Fish
Rub a handful of salt over the surface to remove the slime peculiar to the fish. For the stuffing two ounces of beef drippings, one ounce salt pork, two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley; fry brown in a saucepan; then add one teaspoonful of chopped capers, half saltspoonful of white pepper, half teaspoonful salt, one gill of broth; stir until boiling hot, place inside of the fish, cut several slices of pork in thin pieces, and lay on either side of the fish, tie it well with a twine, sprinkle with salt and pepper, then serve with a sauce made of stock seasoned with one tablespoonful each of Walnut and Worcestershire sauce, one tablespoonful of chopped capers, and one tablespoonful of parsley.
The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to bake a stuffed fish; the recipe never actually says to put it in the oven, or for how long. Everything below fills those gaps.
- The missing stepThe recipe never says to bake it, though the title implies it. A modern reconstruction would use a moderate oven, around 375-400F, reckoning roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point and basting once or twice; it is done when the flesh at the backbone turns opaque and pulls cleanly from the bone. The temperature and timing are ours, not the book's.
- What blackfish isOn the American Atlantic coast this means tautog, a firm white-fleshed wrasse with notably slimy skin, which is why the recipe opens with a salt rub. Black sea bass, striped bass or any firm 3-4 lb whole white fish behaves the same way in this treatment.
- The salt rubRubbing coarse salt over the skin and then rinsing it off genuinely does strip the mucus layer, on tautog as on eel. Do it before scaling and gutting, and rinse thoroughly or the finished fish will be over-salted on top of the added seasoning.
- UnitsA gill is half a cup. A saltspoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, so "half saltspoonful" of white pepper is about an eighth of a teaspoon. Two ounces of beef drippings is roughly a quarter cup by volume.
- The stuffing needs a binderAs written this is a fat-and-broth mixture with nothing to hold it together. Working in about a cup of dry breadcrumbs before adding the broth will keep the filling from running out into the pan, though the breadcrumbs are our addition, not the book's.
- Salt pork and drippingsBeef drippings means fat saved from roasting; rendered beef fat or butter substitutes directly. The thin slices of pork laid along the sides are barding, which keeps a lean fish moist. Blanch supermarket salt pork briefly if it is very salty, then cut the added salt back.
- Walnut sauceWalnut ketchup, a thin dark sauce of green walnuts, salt and spices, is still made in Britain and sold by a few specialists. Failing that, use a second spoonful of Worcestershire, another of the pungent brown bottled table sauces of the period.
- The sauce"Stock" here probably means fish or light meat broth. Reduce a cup or so and stir in the two sauces, capers and parsley off the heat; the reduction and the order are our suggestion, as the recipe specifies neither.
- YieldA 3-4 lb whole fish stuffed this way serves four.
Tautog, called blackfish along the New York and New England shore, was a cheap and abundant market fish in the nineteenth century, sold whole, and its dense flesh holds its shape better than cod or flounder. The stuffing here is an unusual one: no sage or onion, but capers, parsley and a spoonful of two commercial bottled sauces. Walnut ketchup and Worcestershire were standard sharp seasonings of an English-influenced American kitchen, and their appearance in a household compilation like this one shows how far bought sauces had come to stand in for the cook's own spiced vinegars. The barding of salt pork on either side of the fish is older still, a plain solution to the problem of baking a lean fish in a dry oven.