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Baked Fish
Take any kind of nice fish large enough to bake; when clean, dry with a cloth and fill with a dressing made of four or five hard-boiled eggs chopped fine, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, a little parsley and onions, if liked; tie it up well with cords to keep dressing in, put in a baking pan with a little water, and bake. Be sure to keep quite moist while cooking by basting often; when well cooked put on a platter, clip the strings, and pull them off, and cover fish with a thick sauce made of four or five hard boiled eggs, mashed, one half cup of vinegar, one tablespoonful of butter, two tablespoonfuls of sugar, pepper, salt, and a few white mustard seed; let this cook till stiff, pour over fish on platter, over this arrange the chopped whites of eggs, and garnish around with curled parsley. -Mrs. J. P. Hird.
A whole stuffed fish with an old-fashioned cooked egg dressing. The original gives neither oven temperature nor timing, so those are the first things to supply.
- Oven and timeBake at 375F. A whole fish of 3-4 lb takes roughly 35-45 minutes; go by internal temperature at the thickest part behind the head, 145F, rather than by the clock. Stuffing slows the heat, so allow the longer end of the range.
- Choosing the fish"Any kind of nice fish large enough to bake" meant whatever came in whole and firm-fleshed: whitefish, bass, bluefish, salmon, red snapper. Ask for it scaled and gutted with the head on, and split the belly cavity a little further if you need room for the dressing.
- TrussingCotton kitchen twine, not the cords of the period, and tie it in three or four separate loops rather than one continuous lacing. That way you can clip each one and lift it clear without dragging the stuffing out, as the recipe intends.
- The dressing quantityNo bread crumb amount is given. For a 3-4 lb fish, four or five chopped hard-boiled eggs with about 2 cups of soft crumbs, a tablespoon of chopped parsley and a tablespoon of grated onion fills the cavity without packing it tight.
- Basting and the water"A little water" means a shallow film in the bottom of the pan, no more. Baste every ten minutes with the pan liquid and a little melted butter; a whole fish dries out fast once the skin cracks.
- The sauce is already cookedIts eggs are hard-boiled going in, so "let this cook till stiff" only means thickening the vinegar, butter and sugar over gentle heat until it holds a spoon. Stir it as it thickens.
- Reserve the whitesThe sauce calls for four or five mashed eggs and then chopped whites scattered over the top. Either separate a couple of the boiled eggs, mashing the yolks into the sauce and keeping those whites for the garnish, or boil an extra egg or two for the topping.
- White mustard seedThe pale yellow seed sold today as yellow mustard seed. A teaspoon is plenty; it stays whole and gives the sauce its texture, so do not substitute prepared mustard.
- YieldA 3-4 lb stuffed fish serves four to six. The sauce is sharp and sweet at once and a little goes far; make about a cup and pass the rest.
Baking a whole fish with a bread-and-egg dressing was standard American practice through the nineteenth century, when fish arrived at the market whole and a cook was expected to know how to stuff and truss it herself. The sauce here is more distinctive: vinegar, sugar, butter and mashed egg yolk thickened over the fire is a close relation of the boiled dressings used on cabbage slaw and potato salad in the same period, before bottled mayonnaise existed. Community cookbooks of this kind were assembled from contributed recipes, often signed with the contributor's married name, and Mrs. J. P. Hird's habit of describing method while leaving out amounts, oven heat and timing is typical of a genre written for cooks who already knew what a baking fish looked like when it was done.