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Baked Sheepshead
Prepare the fish for cooking, gash the sides in several places, use salt and pepper freely. Mix with one pint of stale bread crumbs some finely chopped meat, thyme, some salt, cayenne pepper, the yolk of two or three eggs; mix the ingredients well together, then stuff the gashes and inside. Sprinkle well with flour and black pepper; place in a pan the proper size with one quart of water; bake fully two hours. Serve with any kind of sauce desired
A plain whole baked fish with a bread stuffing pressed into slashed sides. Almost everything here works as written except the cooking time, which belongs to an era that liked fish cooked to flakes.
- The two hoursA 4-6 lb whole sheepshead at 350F is generally done in 45 to 60 minutes, when the flesh at the backbone reaches roughly 135-140F and slips from the bone. Two hours will leave dry, cottony flesh no sauce can rescue.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Read it as a moderate oven, 350F, which suits a stuffed whole fish.
- "Some finely chopped meat"The recipe does not say what meat. In stuffings of this kind it most often meant salt pork, bacon or cooked ham, chopped fine to enrich a lean stuffing; roughly 4 oz to the pint of crumbs works.
- Stale bread crumbsA pint of crumbs from day-old bread, torn or grated, not the fine dried crumbs sold in canisters. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will make the stuffing pasty.
- The quart of waterThat much liquid in the pan steams the fish as much as it bakes it and keeps the skin from crisping. A cup or so is enough to make basting liquid and pan sauce; baste every 15 minutes.
- Buying the fishTrue sheepshead is the Atlantic and Gulf porgy relative, sold whole and scaled at good fish counters; the Great Lakes freshwater drum sold under the same name is a different fish. Black drum, red snapper, striped bass or any firm whole fish of similar size substitutes directly.
- The gashesCut through the skin to the bone at an angle, three or four to a side. They let seasoning and stuffing reach the thick shoulder meat and tell you when the fish is cooked, since the flesh opens along the cuts.
- Yield and sauceA 5 lb fish serves five or six. "Any kind of sauce desired" would in this period have suggested drawn butter, egg sauce or tomato sauce; the strained pan liquid thickened with butter and flour is the obvious choice.
Sheepshead was one of the great table fish of the nineteenth-century American coast, its name generally traced to its blunt, crushing incisors, which it uses to break open barnacles and crabs. It was abundant enough around New York that Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn took its name from the catch, and the name lingered on menus. Confusingly, cooks in the interior applied "sheepshead" to the freshwater drum, a wholly different and much less esteemed fish, so recipes of this period may mean either. Baking a whole fish with a forcemeat of crumbs, chopped pork and egg yolk pressed into slashed sides is older still, and the slashing served the practical purpose of getting seasoning into a thick-bodied fish that would otherwise cook only at the surface.