Clean the fish; cut open along the back-bone. Remove all the fish from the skin and bone from head to tail and chop fine. Fry 1 onion in butter; add some soaked bread. Take from the fire and mix with the chopped fish. Add 2 eggs and chopped parsley; season highly with salt and pepper, a pinch of cloves and nutmeg. Fill the skin of the fish with the mixture and boil with sliced onions, a few lemon slices, some parsley and a tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper, until done. Serve hot or cold.
A whole stuffed fish, poached rather than baked — the ancestor of the pressed gefilte fish loaf. The original assumes you know how to bone a fish through the back, which is the whole job.
- The hinge: keep the skin wholeCut down either side of the backbone from the outside and lift out the frame, working the flesh free with a spoon or the back of a knife so the skin stays in one piece with head and tail attached. Any tear will leak stuffing into the poaching liquid; a few stitches with kitchen twine, or a wrapping of cheesecloth, will hold it.
- Which fishThe book does not say. Carp or pike is traditional for this dish in Polish and Jewish cooking; a 3-4 lb whole fish gives enough skin to fill and enough flesh for the forcemeat. Whitefish, mullet or a large trout all work.
- "Boil" means poachA rolling boil will burst the skin and squeeze the filling out. Bring the liquid to a bare shiver — 175-180F, barely trembling — and hold it there. Add water or fish stock to come about halfway up the fish and cover.
- Timing and donenessReckon roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, so 30-40 minutes for a 3-4 lb fish. The stuffing contains egg and must reach 165F at the centre; test with a probe rather than by clock.
- Soaked breadStale white bread or challah, crusts off, soaked in milk or water and squeezed nearly dry. The book says only "some": keep the bread well short of the weight of the fish flesh, or the forcemeat tastes of bread rather than fish. Fresh supermarket sandwich bread turns pasty; dry it in a low oven first if that is all you have.
- Grinding the flesh"Chop fine" means a proper paste. Pulse the flesh in a food processor in short bursts with the onion and bread, keeping everything cold, and stop before it warms and turns gluey.
- Seasoning"Season highly" is deliberate — fish forcemeat tastes flat when cold. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture and taste before you fill the skin. A pinch of cloves is genuinely a pinch; more and it dominates.
- ServingA 3-4 lb fish serves six. Served cold, the poaching liquid sets to a light jelly on its own if the head and bones went into the pot — strain it over the fish and chill overnight.
Stuffed whole fish, boned through the back and poached in its own skin, is a festive dish long associated with the Polish and Lithuanian kitchen, and is generally taken to be a forerunner of gefilte fish — gefilte being simply Yiddish for "filled." The labour of boning made it a Sabbath and holiday dish: the work could be done in advance and the fish served cold, which suited a household that would not cook after sundown. Carp was the usual fish, farmed in the monastery and manor ponds of central Europe since the Middle Ages and sold live. Over time the skin was often abandoned and the seasoned forcemeat poached as balls or a loaf, which is the form most people now recognise; recipes like this one catch the older whole-fish version. The pinch of cloves and nutmeg is a long-standing central European habit, often said to echo the medieval taste for warm spice with freshwater fish.