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White Fish A La Point
After cleaning the fish lay it open, remove the back bone, placing it in a buttered baking pan, skin next to the pan. Season freely with pepper, salt, little lemon juice, and butter. Put two cups of water in the pan around the sides of fish. Bake in a hot oven ; a four pound fish should cook fifteen minutes. Large white fish are superior to small ones.
A plain planked-style baking method for a split whitefish. The timing is aggressive by modern standards and the fish size is the variable that matters most.
- "A hot oven"The recipe gives no temperature; on nineteenth-century reckoning a hot oven is roughly 400-450F. At that heat the fish is closer to roasted than baked, which is what helps a butterflied fish through the fifteen minutes given.
- The timingFifteen minutes for a four-pound split fish is only plausible in a genuinely hot oven with the fish laid flat and open. Check at ten minutes: the flesh should just flake at the thickest point. The USDA figure for fish is 145F. Whitefish is fatty enough to forgive a little extra, but not much.
- "Lay it open"Butterfly the fish along the belly and lift out the backbone, leaving the two sides joined by the skin. It cooks as one flat piece, skin down, which is why the times are so short.
- The two cups of waterPoured around the sides, not over the fish, as the text specifies. It will steam the underside and keep the pan from scorching in a hot oven.
- Which fish"White fish" here means Great Lakes whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis), a rich, soft-fleshed relative of the trout, not the generic "whitefish" of a fish counter. Lake trout, char or a whole boned bluefish behave similarly; cod and haddock are leaner and will dry faster.
- Seasoning"Season freely" implies dotting the butter generously over the cut surface; the recipe sets no quantity, so three to four tablespoons for a four-pound fish is a modern suggestion, plus the lemon and a good deal of salt and pepper.
- YieldA four-pound whole fish gives roughly two pounds of edible flesh, serving four as a main course.
Whitefish was the great commercial catch of the upper Great Lakes through the nineteenth century, shipped salted and, once ice and rail allowed, fresh to the cities of the interior; the fish appears often in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s in a way it no longer does. The instruction to split the fish, bone it and cook it flat and open recalls the older lakeside and shore-dinner practice of nailing a split fish to a hardwood plank and standing it before an open fire, a method usually traced to Native fishing camps and taken up by hotel and excursion cooks around Detroit, Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie. Baked in a pan with water around it, as here, the technique was adapted to a coal range. The closing remark that large whitefish beat small ones reflects a market where fish were sold whole by weight, and larger fish are often said to be the richer eating, which is what this fast, dry heat needs.