Home › Fish, Oysters, Etc › Boiled Fish
Boiled Fish
Wash the fish, then wrap in a cloth and put into a pan of hot water, with a tablespoonful of salt; there should be a slow movement of the water for about thirty-five minutes, at the expiration of which the fish will generally cook sufficiently. When done, remove the cloth, and serve with drawn butter.
A bare-bones method that assumes a whole fish of several pounds and a cook who knows what "done" looks like. Two things need translating: the water temperature and the time.
- "A slow movement of the water"This is poaching, not boiling — 160–180F, with a lazy shiver at the surface and no rolling bubbles. A true boil tears the flakes apart and squeezes out moisture, which is why the original is careful to specify slow movement.
- Thirty-five minutes is for a whole fishThe recipe gives no weight, but a thirty-five minute poach implies a whole fish of several pounds rather than a portion cut. Modern practice measures by thickness: about 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point. A 1-inch salmon steak or cod fillet is done in 8-10 minutes; at thirty-five it is chalk.
- DonenessThe flesh should be opaque throughout and pull away from the bone at the spine. The USDA figure for fish is 145F at the thickest part on an instant-read thermometer; cooks who prefer salmon softer pull it lower, but 145F is the safe number. Carryover cooking continues after it leaves the water.
- The clothWrapping in cheesecloth or a clean linen towel, with the ends left long, is how you lift a whole fish out without breaking it. A poaching rack, or a plate-and-two-slings arrangement, does the same job. Leave the cloth loose so water circulates.
- SaltA tablespoon in a large pan of water is very lightly seasoned by modern standards. Closer to 1 tablespoon per quart gives fish that tastes salted rather than washed; a splash of vinegar or lemon juice and a few peppercorns, bay and onion turn the water into a simple court bouillon.
- Drawn butterIn American books of this period drawn butter usually means a thin butter sauce — melted butter thickened with a little flour and hot water or fish liquid, seasoned and sometimes finished with lemon or chopped parsley. Plain melted butter is the shortcut, but it is not quite what the book means.
- YieldFigure about 12-16 oz of whole fish per person, or 5-6 oz of fillet, since a whole fish loses roughly half its weight to head, bone and skin. A 4 lb fish serves four to six.
Boiled fish held a fixed place on nineteenth-century American and British tables: cod, haddock, halibut or salmon, poached whole and sent out with a white or drawn butter sauce. It is often said to have served both as a Friday and Lenten dish and as an invalid's dinner, since nothing was fried or highly seasoned. Household books print the method in this abbreviated form because it was assumed knowledge "the cook already knew which fish to buy and what a cooked fish looked like, so the text only records the details that go wrong, namely water kept too hot and a fish that falls apart when lifted. The cloth wrapping survived alongside the fish kettle; the same trick appears in recipes for boiled puddings and boiled fowl. The insistence on slow water is the one piece of real technique here, and it is the same instruction a modern poaching recipe gives, only without a thermometer to hang it on.