Baked Fish
Clean, rinse, and wipe dry a white fish, or any fish weighing three or four pounds, rub the fish inside and out with salt and pepper, fill with a stuffing made like that for poultry, but drier; sew it up and put in a hot pan, with some drippings and a lump of butter, dredge with flour, and lay over the fish a few thin slices of salt pork or bits of butter, and bake an hour and a half, basting occasionally.-Mrs. A. Wilson, Rye, New York.
A plain nineteenth-century baked stuffed fish. Everything in it still works except the cooking time, which will reduce a good fish to cotton wool.
- Cut the time by half or moreAn hour and a half is the single instruction to ignore. A stuffed 3-4 lb whole fish is done in roughly 40-55 minutes; the flesh should flake at the backbone and read 145F at the thickest part, with the stuffing itself at 165F.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book was written for a wood range, and its "hot pan" refers to the pan rather than the oven. A fairly hot oven, in the region of 400F, suits a fish of this size and helps crisp the pork and skin without drying the flanks.
- White fishProbably Great Lakes whitefish, a moderately fatty freshwater relative of trout, though the recipe itself allows "any fish" of the weight. Lake trout, char, striped bass, snapper or a whole salmon of the same weight all behave similarly; very lean fish such as cod will dry out sooner.
- DrippingsThe rendered fat kept from roasting beef or pork. Bacon fat, butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly; use about two tablespoons in the pan.
- "Drier" stuffingPoultry stuffing of the period was generally bread, butter, sage or summer savory, salt and pepper, moistened with a little water or egg. The recipe does not say why it should be drier here; the fish releases considerable liquid as it bakes. Pack it loosely, and only enough to fill the cavity, not to strain the stitches.
- Sewing upCoarse cotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle, or simply close the cavity with two or three metal skewers laced with twine. Remove before serving.
- Salt porkThin slices of cured fatback, which baste the fish as they render. Streaky bacon does the same job, though it brings smoke the original would not have had. If you use salt pork, salt the fish lightly inside only.
- Basting and servingBaste every fifteen minutes or so with the pan fat; the flour dredge and the drippings make a thin gravy worth spooning over. A 3-4 lb stuffed fish serves five or six.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and the attributions--here Mrs. A. Wilson of Rye, New York--record a network of women trading receipts by mail well beyond the state line. Whitefish suits the period: the Great Lakes fishery was a major commercial concern in these decades, and ice-packed and, increasingly, refrigerated rail shipment was extending the reach of fresh lake fish into inland towns that had otherwise relied heavily on salt cod and salt mackerel. Baking a whole fish stuffed like a fowl was a long-established treatment in English and American cookery well before this book, the stuffing serving both to season a bland freshwater fish and to stretch it across a large family table. The long cooking time likely reflects a different standard of doneness: cooks of the period wanted fish thoroughly firm, and the flaky, barely-set flesh preferred today would probably have struck them as underdone.