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Baked Bluefish
Select nice large bluefish, clean and prepare it for baking. Wash it in salted water, and after drying it thoroughly, stuff with bread stuffing, and sew up opening and rub fish all over with salt. Then, having put small pieces of Crisco over, place in pan with enough water to cover bottom, and bake in hot oven 45 or 50 minutes. After it begins to bake, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Baste it often with liquid in pan and a little melted Crisco. When it is cooked and a nice color, remove carefully to hot plate. Do not break it. Serve with brown sauce poured round fish as garnish, or serve it in a separate dish.
A straightforward whole stuffed baked fish from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written for cooks who knew fish better than most of us do. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in period cookbooks generally corresponds to somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat a stuffed fish of about 3-4 lb should be done in 45-50 minutes; check for 145F at the thickest part of the flesh, away from the stuffing.
- Stuff it and the timing changesThe bread stuffing is the slowest part of the dish. If you stuff loosely, heat moves through; packed tight, the fish overcooks before the centre of the stuffing is hot. Bring the stuffing to 165F.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was published and the book exists to sell it. Any solid or liquid fat works — butter dotted over the top browns better, though it scorches faster at 450F than shortening does.
- Bluefish is an oily fishIt carries a strong, distinctly fishy flavour when less than very fresh, and it does not improve in the refrigerator. Buy it the day you bake it. The recipe's wash in salted water is a brief rinse rather than a soak.
- Size matters"Nice large bluefish" is elastic. A 3-4 lb fish serves four; anything over 5 lb needs longer and benefits from slashing the thick shoulder twice on each side.
- Sewing it upKitchen twine and a trussing needle, or simply skewers laced with twine across the belly cavity. Remove them before the fish goes to the table, not after — the instruction "do not break it" is the whole difficulty of the dish.
- Moving the fishBake on a sheet of parchment or a length of doubled foil with the ends left long, and lift by those. A whole baked fish will not survive two spatulas.
- Brown sauceMost likely a browned flour-and-stock gravy of the period sort rather than anything bottled. The pan liquid plus a little roux and fish or chicken stock does the job.
Bluefish was cheap, abundant and unavoidable along the American Atlantic coast in the early twentieth century — a summer fish that came in vast schools and had to be eaten quickly, and many period cookbooks bake it whole with stuffing rather than treating it delicately. This particular version comes from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, one of a large family of manufacturer-issued volumes that Procter & Gamble put out after introducing hydrogenated vegetable shortening in 1911; the recipes are conventional American cooking with the new fat inserted wherever lard or butter would once have stood, and the repeated instruction to baste "with a little melted Crisco" is doing advertising work as much as culinary work.