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Stuffing for Fish (Cup cracker crumbs teaspoon)
1/2 cup cracker crumbs. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 cup stale bread crumbs. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 5 tablespoons butter. 1/2 cup hot water.
Onion juice.
PROCESS: Mix crumbs, add seasoning, melt butter and hot water, add to crumbs, toss lightly with a fork and add onion juice to taste.
A plain crumb stuffing meant to be packed into a whole fish before baking. It comes together in a few minutes, and the only real risk is overworking it into paste.
- Cracker crumbsAt the time this book was written this meant common soda or water crackers, crushed fine — closer to a saltine than to a modern buttery snack cracker. Saltines work directly; if you use them, cut the added salt to a pinch.
- Stale bread crumbsDay-old white bread torn or grated, not the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters. Packaged dry crumbs will drink the liquid and turn dense; pulse stale bread coarsely instead.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: a halved onion pressed against a grater or reamer, the juice collected and the pulp discarded, so the flavour goes in without visible pieces. A teaspoon or two is about right; grated onion squeezed in a cloth gives the same thing.
- Butter and water togetherMelt the 5 tablespoons of butter into the half cup of hot water and pour the mixture over the crumbs all at once. Adding them separately gives you damp patches and dry patches.
- Toss, do not stirThe fork-tossing is the hinge of the recipe. Stuffing for fish should stay loose and crumbly so steam moves through it; compressed into a ball it bakes gluey.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to fill a 3–4 lb whole fish or a pair of smaller ones. Pack it in lightly and close the cavity with skewers or a few loops of kitchen twine.
- DonenessJudge the fish, not the stuffing: modern guidance is about 145F at the thickest part of the flesh, roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness in a moderately hot oven — the recipe itself gives no baking directions. Stuffing slows the centre, so allow a little longer than for an empty fish.
Crumb stuffings like this one were a common American treatment for a whole baked fish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — cheap starch, plenty of butter, and just enough onion to season the flesh from the inside as it steams. Soda crackers were a widely available commercial pantry staple by the late nineteenth century, and cooks used them for thickening, breading and stuffing much as later generations reached for packaged breadcrumbs. 52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the menu-book genre, in which each week's meal was planned out in full for the cook of a modest household; a component like this appears without ceremony.