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Baked Black Bass
Clean a four-pound Black Bass, pickerel or haddock, sprinkle with salt, stuff and sew with No. 8 cotton thread. Cut four or five diagonal gashes on each side of backbone and lay in strips of fat salt pork. Have the gashes on one side come between gashes on the other. The fish may be skewered in the shape of the letter S, or placed in an upright position on a well-greased fish sheet, laid in the bottom of a dripping-pan. Brush over with melted butter and sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour and strew small pieces of fat pork around fish. Bake one hour in a hot oven, basting every ten minutes, first with melted butter or dripping, then with fat in dripping-pan as it is tried out. Dispose on hot serving platter, pour around Egg Sauce and garnish with sprays of parsley.
A whole baked fish in the older American style: barded with salt pork, stuffed, and roasted hard. Everything here still works except the timing, which will dry the fish out.
- The hinge: bake far less than an hourA 4-lb whole fish is done at 135-140F at the thickest part, which takes roughly 30-45 minutes in a hot oven, or about 10 minutes per inch of thickness measured at the shoulder. An hour was written for cooler, less predictable ranges; taken literally today it produces dry, chalky flesh.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F. The high heat is what crisps the pork fat and sets the surface, so rather than lowering it, shorten the time.
- No. 8 cotton threadA coarse cotton sewing thread. Plain cotton kitchen twine does the same job, and small metal skewers laced with twine are easier to remove at the table.
- Fish sheetA perforated metal sheet with handles that lifted the fish out whole. A flat cake rack, or a double sling of heavy foil, set inside the dripping-pan (a shallow roasting pan) serves the same purpose.
- Salt pork and "tried out"Fat salt pork is the barding; thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the closest supermarket substitute, though smoked bacon will flavor the fish. "As it is tried out" means as the pork fat renders into the pan -- switch to basting with that once there is enough of it.
- StuffingThe book assumes its own bread stuffing, not given here. Any dry bread stuffing with onion, herbs and butter suits; pack it loosely, and if the fish is stuffed, check the temperature of the stuffing as well as the flesh.
- Egg SauceA cross-reference, not an omission: a plain butter-and-flour white sauce, seasoned, with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in at the end. It is what makes the dish read as period rather than plain roast fish.
- Fish and yieldBlack bass is a game fish, not a commercial one; pickerel and haddock are the recipe's own substitutes, and whole branzino, striped bass, snapper or a small haddock all behave the same way. A 4-lb whole fish serves four to six.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era of American cookbooks written around the weekly roast. Black bass was a game fish rather than a commercial one, which is plausibly why the recipe offers ocean haddock as an alternative. The barding technique -- gashing the sides and inserting strips of fat salt pork, staggered so the cuts do not meet through the backbone -- is a very old solution to a real problem: lean fish has almost no fat of its own to carry it through a long roast, and the pork both lards the flesh and supplies drippings for basting. Egg sauce as an accompaniment to boiled or baked fish was standard Anglo-American practice through the nineteenth century and appears widely in period cookery books.