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Baked Salmon, Trout or Pickerel
Clean thoroughly, wipe carefully, and lay in a dripping-pan with hot water enough to prevent scorching (a perforated tin sheet or rack fitting loosely in the pan, or several muffin-rings may be used to keep the fish from the bottom of the pan, and the fish may be made to form a circle by tying head and tail together); bake slowly, basting often with butter and water. When done have ready a cup of sweet cream into which a few spoons of hot water have been poured, stir in two table-spoons melted butter and a little chopped parsley, and heat in a vessel of boiling water; add the gravy from the dish and boil up once. Place the fish in a hot dish, and pour over the sauce.-Mrs. Theo. Brown, Cape Girardeau, Mo.
A whole baked fish with a cream-and-parsley sauce finished with the pan juices. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the oven guesswork need translating.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven of this period is generally read as somewhere around 300-325F. The recipe's own stated reason for the water in the pan is to prevent scorching.
- DonenessThe original gives no time. Figure roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness measured at the thickest point, and check for 145F at the spine, or flesh that parts cleanly from the bone.
- Dripping-pan and rackAny roasting pan will do. A wire cooling rack that fits inside replaces the perforated tin sheet or the muffin rings; the point is to keep the skin off the hot metal so the underside steams rather than sticks and scorches.
- PickerelIn nineteenth-century North American usage the word was applied to small pike, and in some regions to walleye. The recipe gives no size; any firm freshwater fish will behave much the same way here.
- "Sweet cream"Unsweetened fresh cream, as opposed to soured cream. Use heavy or whipping cream; the few spoons of hot water simply loosen it before heating.
- "Heat in a vessel of boiling water"A double boiler, or a bowl over a pan of simmering water. This is the hinge of the sauce: cream with butter beaten into it will break over direct heat, and the gentle bath keeps it smooth.
- "Boil up once"Bring it just to the point of bubbling after the pan gravy goes in, then take it off. Held at a boil the sauce separates into butterfat and curds.
- Tying head to tailAn optional bit of Victorian presentation that curls the fish into a ring for the platter. Pass kitchen twine through the gill and around the tail; it makes no difference to the cooking.
- YieldA whole fish of about 4 lb serves six, with the sauce made as written from one cup of cream.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio and mid-western housewives, and the credit line here — Mrs. Theo. Brown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri — puts the dish squarely on the Mississippi. Cape Girardeau sits on the river, and pickerel was local catch rather than a market luxury; salmon appears in the same breath because by the 1870s canned and iced salmon had begun moving inland by rail, and cookbook writers often grouped fish by how they cooked rather than where they came from. The technique itself is older than the book: baking a large fish on a rack over water, basted with butter, is the standard nineteenth-century answer to an oven with no thermostat and no moisture control. The cream sauce finished with the pan gravy belongs to the same plain Anglo-American tradition that gave the period its butter sauces for boiled fish, and the instruction to heat it over boiling water is a sensible guard against curdling.