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Baked White Fish
Prepare a stuffiing of fine bread crumbs, a little salt pork chopped very fine; season highly with sage, parsley, pepper, and salt. Fill the fish with the stuffiing, sew it up, sprinkle the outside with salt, pepper, and pieces of butter; dredge with flour, and bake one hour. Baste quite often. Serve with Hollandaise sauce.
A plain stuffed and roasted whole fish from the era when "white fish" meant the Great Lakes whitefish sold fresh in Midwestern markets. The recipe assumes a large fish and a cook who knows her oven.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood or coal range judged by hand. A moderate oven, around 375F, is a reasonable modern equivalent; an hour's baking implies a fairly large fish, on the order of several pounds.
- The fish"White fish" in a book of this kind most likely means Great Lakes whitefish, a fatty, mild freshwater fish, though the term was also used loosely for white-fleshed fish generally. Any whole round fish of similar size works, but a lean fish will dry out faster than the hour suggests and needs closer watching.
- Doneness, not the clockAn hour is a guide to a large fish only. Cook to 145F at the thickest part of the flesh, or until the flesh at the backbone has just turned opaque and pulls cleanly from the bone.
- Salt porkSalt pork is unsmoked cured pork belly or fatback, and it is the fat and salt for the whole stuffing. Chop it very fine as directed so it renders into the crumbs rather than sitting in lumps. Blanched bacon substitutes, but season with less added salt.
- "Season highly"Nineteenth-century sage-and-pork stuffings were assertive. For about 3 cups of crumbs, a tablespoon of dried rubbed sage is not excessive, though modern palates often prefer half that.
- Sewing upCotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle do the job; wooden picks laced with twine work as well. Whatever goes in must come out before serving.
- Basting"Baste quite often" is not quantified; every ten to twelve minutes with the pan fat is a workable reading, and frequent basting helps keep the dredged flour from scorching while the flesh cooks through. Add a little water or stock to the pan if it runs dry.
- YieldA whole baked fish large enough to need an hour in the oven would serve six to eight.
Whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) was the great commercial catch of the Great Lakes through the nineteenth century, shipped fresh and salted across the upper Midwest and cheap enough to appear constantly in household manuals. The stuffing here -- bread crumbs bound with finely chopped salt pork and pushed hard with sage -- is essentially the poultry forcemeat of the same books, applied to a fish, and reflects the older English habit of treating a large baked fish as a roast rather than as something delicate. The Hollandaise at the end is the newer element: French sauces entered American middle-class cookbooks in force in the 1880s and 1890s through the cooking-school movement, and a page that pairs salt pork stuffing with Hollandaise is showing you both halves of that transition at once.