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Stuffed and Baked Fish
Clean and wipe the fish dry, rub salt inside, and pepper; then salt and flour the outside well; take grated bread crumbs and add a teaspoonful of pepper and salt to one beaten egg, also a little sage and onion; stuff the fish and bake until thoroughly done. Serve with cream or tomato sauce.
A bare-bones Victorian formula that assumes the cook already knows what size fish is on the board and how hot the range is. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- What fish, and how bigThe book names none. A whole round fish of 3-4 lb — bass, snapper, trout, small cod, pike — gutted and scaled with head on, suits this treatment and feeds four to six. Ask the fishmonger to leave the belly cavity clear for stuffing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the range had none. Bake at 400F. A whole stuffed fish wants brisk heat so the skin sets and the flesh does not weep.
- "Until thoroughly done"The one number that matters: 145F at the thickest part, or about 10 minutes per inch of thickness measured at the shoulder. A 3-4 lb stuffed fish runs 35-45 minutes. Overshoot and it goes dry and cottony, which is a likely outcome of cooking to "thoroughly done".
- Stuffing quantitiesThe original gives none. For a 3-4 lb fish use about 2 cups fresh breadcrumbs, one egg, a small onion, a teaspoon of dried sage, and 2-3 tablespoons melted butter to bind — the butter is not in the original at all. The recipe's "a teaspoonful of pepper and salt" is ambiguous; read as a teaspoon of each it is heavy for that volume by modern taste, and half is plenty.
- Cook the onion firstRaw chopped onion in the cavity of a fish that bakes 40 minutes stays crunchy and sharp. Sweat it in butter until soft before mixing it into the crumbs.
- Salt and flour the outsideThis is the period's method for a crisp skin. Pat the fish genuinely dry, dust thinly with seasoned flour, and set it on a buttered dish or parchment; the flour will otherwise glue itself to the pan.
- Close the cavityNot mentioned, but stuffing will fall out. Skewer the belly shut or tie the fish at two or three points with kitchen string.
- The sauces"Cream sauce" here most likely means a plain béchamel-style white sauce; tomato sauce of the period was generally a smooth cooked purée rather than anything Italian. Either is made while the fish bakes.
Sage-and-onion breadcrumb stuffing is an English inheritance — the same mixture that went into roast goose and pork — pressed into service for fish, which tells you how conservative the American household repertoire still was. Baking a whole fish stuffed was the standard way to make one large fish stretch across a table, and the stuffing added bulk. Books of this era routinely leave out the size of the fish, the oven temperature and the amount of stuffing, on the assumption that the recipe was a reminder rather than a set of instructions. The cream or tomato sauce alternative is characteristic too: the white sauce for a plain family dinner, the tomato when something more emphatic was wanted.