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Selecting, Preparing, and Cooking
All fish lose their flavor in a short time after being taken from the water; hence it is necessary to purchase those recently caught. Fish, when fresh caught, are hard when pressed by the finger, the eyes full and the gills red. If the flesh is flabby and the eyes sunken, the fish are stale. They should be carefully cleaned, washed, and salted. In preparing they are often spoiled by improper judgment. Fish should remain only a short time in water, as it causes them to become soft and flabby. If the fish be frozen, the frost should always be taken out in cold water, or it will be soft and fall to pieces.
The earthy taste often found in fresh water fish may be extracted by soaking in salt and water.
All fish are better if allowed to take salt an hour or so before cooking. Most kinds of salt fish should be soaked in cold water for twenty-four hours. The fleshy side turned down in the water.
Fish should be well cleaned preparatory to cooking; they may be readily scaled by plunging them for an instant in hot water, then washing and scraping away all coagulated blood.
It injures fish to wash them too much, as it destroys their flavor. Nearly all kinds of fish are better in cold weather. Mackerel in July, August, September, and October.
Shad are good from April to June.
For invalids, white fish are considered the best.
Fish, unless good, are very inferior eating. Cooks should consider what fish they have and cook accordingly. Some varieties when boiled or baked are fine, but tasteless if fried or broiled:
Large fish are generally baked or boiled. Small ones, fried or broiled. Trout should always be boiled or baked.
Red Snapper always boiled.
White fish, best when broiled.
Fresh mackerel should always be broiled. [78] Fish should always be boiled very gently. Sew them in a cloth and drop in cold water with a sufficient quantity of salt. Boil about thirty minutes. For broiling fish, the gridiron must be rubbed with a piece of fat, to prevent its sticking. Lay the skin side down first. Fish should never be turned with a knife and fork, but hold a tin-sheet upon it with one hand and turn over the gridiron with the other. Fish will break if not turned in this way.
All fish should be eaten immediately after being cooked. FISH A LA CRÊME.
Boil a fish, pick out all the bones, and mince well. Mix a pint of cream, one tablespoonful of flour, one onion chopped fine, salt, and a half pound of butter; set it on the fire and stir until it thickens. Put in a deep dish alternately fish, cracker crumbs, and cream. Bake in a moderate oven until brown.
The page is two things at once: a page of general fish lore, and at the end a workable creamed-fish gratin. Both need translating.
- The oven"A moderate oven" is 350F. The dish is already cooked through, so you are only heating it and browning the top — 20 to 25 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler at the end.
- Cut the butter hardHalf a pound of butter to a pint of cream is period richness, not a typo, but it will break into an oil slick in a modern oven. Two to three tablespoons is enough to carry the flour and onion; the cream does the rest.
- Make it as a proper sauceAs written the flour goes into cold cream, which invites lumps. Cook the chopped onion in the butter, stir in the flour, then add the cream (2 cups) gradually and simmer until it coats a spoon.
- Thirty minutes is far too longThe instruction to boil fish half an hour dates from whole large fish poached in a kettle. Modern practice is 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness at a bare simmer, and a fillet may need only 5. Overboiled fish turns cottony and the flakes fall apart before you can pick the bones.
- Sewing in a clothA rinsed square of cheesecloth or a parchment sling in a wide pan does the same job — it lets you lift the fish out whole. A poaching insert or a steamer basket works as well.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda or saltine crumbs, coarsely crushed, not sweet cracker or graham. Panko is a reasonable stand-in but absorbs less of the cream; use a little less of it.
- Salt fish and frozen fishTwenty-four hours of soaking is right for hard-cured salt cod, but change the water three or four times and keep it in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Frozen fish is best thawed overnight in the refrigerator rather than in a bowl of cold water left standing.
- YieldAbout a pound of cooked, picked fish with 2 cups of cream fills a 1.5-quart dish and serves four to six. Any firm white fish works; cod, haddock or pollock are the obvious choices.
The long preamble here is doing work that no modern cookbook needs to do: teaching a housekeeper to judge fish by eye, finger and gill because she was buying from a cart or a market stall with no refrigeration behind it, and because a bad fish was both a wasted dinner and a real risk. The month-by-month calendar — mackerel in late summer, shad from April to June — reflects the actual run of Atlantic fisheries rather than any culinary preference, and the note that "for invalids, white fish are considered the best" belongs to the era's sickroom cookery, which prized bland, lean, easily digested food. The recipe itself is one of the great uses for leftovers: cooked fish, a cream sauce and crumbs, baked until brown. English and American books of the period call the same idea scalloped fish or fish au gratin, and the French label "à la crème" was applied freely to anything finished in cream, a habit often attributed to the prestige of French restaurant menus among nineteenth-century American publishers.