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Bread Stuffing for Baked Fish
2 Cupfuls Soft Bread Crumbs 4 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift, Melted ¾ Teaspoonful Salt ¼ Teaspoonful Pepper 1 Tablespoonful Finely-minced Onion 1 Tablespoonful Finely-minced Parsley 1 Teaspoonful Poultry Seasoning Combine the ingredients in the order given and use as desired.
A plain bread stuffing built on shortening rather than butter, sized for one medium baked fish. It comes together in a bowl in about five minutes.
- SnowdriftA brand of vegetable shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, made from cottonseed oil (earlier versions were a compound stiffened with beef stearine; later ones hydrogenated). Melted butter is the closest substitute for flavour; any neutral solid shortening or 3 tablespoons of oil will do the same structural job.
- The fractionsThe salt reads as 3/4 teaspoon and the pepper as 1/4 teaspoon. Those proportions are consistent with the rest of the formula for 2 cups of crumbs.
- Soft bread crumbsThis means the interior of day-old bread torn or rubbed into loose crumbs, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in a canister. Dry crumbs will absorb the fat and pack into a dense paste; if that is all you have, use about 1 1/2 cups and add a spoonful or two of liquid.
- Poultry seasoningA commercial blend, then as now mostly sage and thyme with marjoram and often savoury. A scant teaspoon of dried sage and thyme mixed roughly two to one gives the same effect.
- Raw onionThe minced onion goes in uncooked and will stay assertive. Softening it in the melted fat first mellows it and suits delicate white fish better.
- Yield and useAbout 2 cups loosely packed, enough for a 3 to 4 lb whole fish or to spread between two fillets. Fill the cavity loosely and secure with skewers or string; when stuffing is baked inside the fish, the fish should reach 145F at the thickest point and the stuffing itself 165F.
Recipes like this one exist to sell the fat in them. A New Snowdrift Cook Book was promotional literature from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, whose Snowdrift shortening was among the products that turned cottonseed oil, once a waste stream of the cotton gin, into a kitchen staple in the early twentieth century. Recipes in such books tend to substitute the branded shortening wherever a household cook would have reached for butter, lard or suet, and a bread stuffing was an easy demonstration: the fat contributes no flavour of its own, so nothing seems lost. Bread stuffings for fish were standard American practice by then, appearing in general cookbooks under baked shad, bluefish and whitefish, and were generally understood as a way to stretch an expensive whole fish across more plates.