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Boiled Bass
Clean the fish well, put it in a saucepan with sufficient water to cover it, add salt, place the saucepan over the fire; after boiling a few minutes see if the fins are loose and can be removed readily; if so, take it from the pan, place on a platter, surrounding the fish with hard-boiled eggs. Serve with sauce.
A bare-bones poaching method that assumes the cook already knows what a finished fish looks like. The doneness cue is the whole recipe; everything else is left to judgment.
- The hinge: loose finsTugging a dorsal or pectoral fin and finding it pulls free is the classic test that the flesh has set through. It is reliable, but by the time it works cleanly a thin fillet is overdone; use it on a whole fish and confirm with an instant-read thermometer at the thickest point behind the head, around 135-140F.
- "Boiling" means a bare simmer"Boiling" -- the recipe does say boil, and checks the fish after only a few minutes. Modern practice is gentler: a rolling boil shreds the skin and toughens the flesh, so bring the pan up and then hold it at a bare simmer, around 170-180F, reckoning roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the fish's deepest point. That will take considerably longer than the recipe implies.
- Which bassThe recipe does not say. Striped bass, sold whole at 3-6 lb, is a plausible candidate, and black sea bass or a whole branzino works the same way. A 3 lb whole fish serves four.
- Salt the water properlyThe recipe gives no quantity. Season the poaching water to about 1 tablespoon of salt per quart, roughly the salinity of a light brine, or the fish comes out flat.
- The panA saucepan deep enough to cover a whole bass is a fish kettle with a lifting rack. Lacking one, a roasting pan across two burners works, and wrapping the fish in cheesecloth with the ends left long gives you handles for lifting it out intact.
- "Serve with sauce"The recipe names none. Drawn butter or a plain egg sauce are the conventional partners for boiled fish of this kind, and the hard-boiled eggs ringing the platter may point towards the latter, though that is inference rather than instruction.
- Don't waste the liquidAdding an onion, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a splash of vinegar to the water turns it into a court bouillon and costs nothing. The strained liquid also makes the base for the sauce.
Boiled fish served whole with a border of sliced hard-boiled egg and a butter or egg sauce was standard Anglo-American dinner-table practice through the nineteenth century, and household books like this one reprint the method with almost no elaboration. The brevity is itself informative: the writer specifies no weight, no time and no sauce, trusting the loose-fin test to carry the whole instruction. Striped bass was abundant and cheap along the Atlantic seaboard in this period, which is why it turns up in general household manuals rather than only in fancier cookery; the same treatment was given to cod, haddock and salmon, with the sauce doing most of the work of distinguishing one dish from another.