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Lake Trout Baked in Paper Bag
Clean a four-pound lake trout. Sprinkle inside with salt and Fill with stuffing (recipe next page); sew. Spread with soft butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Lay fish carefully in a well greased paper bag, add one-fourth cup white wine, onehalf onion finely chopped, six fresh (or ten canned) mushrooms, cut in small pieces, and one-fourth cup water. Press air from bag, fold open end over three times, fold sides and corners close to fish, first moistening the bag on corners and edges; lay in a drippingpan and place in a hot oven. When bag is browned evenly (not burned) reduce heat, and bake fish one hour. (Bag will brown in ten minutes.) Remove from bag to serving platter and pour contents of bag over fish. Serve with the following sauce:
This is paper-bag cookery, a briefly fashionable technique of the 1910s that survives today as en papillote. The method still works; the timing does not.
- The bagUse parchment paper rather than a modern paper grocery bag, which may be recycled stock with inks, glues or wet-strength additives. A double sheet of parchment folded and crimped as described, or a large sheet of parchment inside a loose foil shell, gives the same sealed steam pocket.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no figures; "hot oven" in period usage means roughly 400-450F. Start there to set and brown the paper, then reduce to about 350F for the remainder.
- One hour is far too longA stuffed four-pound trout needs roughly 35 to 45 minutes at 350F after the initial blast, not a full hour. Cook to 145F at the thickest part of the flesh, taken away from the stuffing, and check the stuffing has reached 165F. An hour will leave the fish dry and cottony.
- Stuffing a whole fishPack the cavity loosely so steam can move through it, and close with a trussing needle and cotton twine, or simply with three or four wooden skewers laced with twine. Stuff immediately before baking, never in advance.
- LiquidA quarter cup each of white wine and water is not a poaching bath but the seed of the sauce, which is why the bag contents are poured back over the fish. Do not add more; the sealed paper traps the fish's own juices.
- MushroomsSix fresh mushrooms here most likely means small button mushrooms; the recipe's own ratio of six fresh to ten canned suggests the canned pieces were smaller. Canned mushrooms were clearly an accepted substitute, as the recipe allows; fresh cremini are better and need no adjustment.
- Lake troutA whole four-pound lake trout is a special order at most counters. Any whole oily-fleshed fish of that size works: char, salmon trout, small salmon, or a large rainbow trout.
- YieldA four-pound whole fish with stuffing serves five or six as a main course.
Paper-bag cookery was a genuine craze, and a short one. It is generally traced to Nicolas Soyer, chef at Brooks's Club in London, whose Paper-Bag Cookery appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in American editions almost at once; newspapers and women's magazines on both sides of the Atlantic spent the following two or three years testing the method on everything from chops to whole fish. The appeal was practical: the sealed bag kept the oven clean, needed no basting, and held in the juices and aroma of foods that ordinarily dried out under direct heat. Elizabeth O. Hiller's inclusion of the technique in 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) catches the fashion at its height, and the instruction to moisten the corners before folding is the sort of hard-won detail that suggests she had scorched a few bags herself. The bags themselves fell out of use, but the principle did not: what Hiller describes is the same steam-in-a-sealed-parcel method that cooks now perform in parchment.