Boiled Fish
To boil a fish, fill with a rich dressing of rolled crackers seasoned with butter, pepper, salt and sage, wrap it in a well-floured cloth, tie closely with twine or sew, and place in well-salted boiling water. Place where it will simmer from eight to ten minutes to the pound, according to size and thickness of fish. - Mrs. Henry C. Farrar, Cleveland, Tenn.
A stuffed whole fish poached in a cloth, which is really a method rather than a fixed recipe. The cloth is the point: it holds the stuffing in and lets you lift the fish out intact.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe instruction to "place where it will simmer" matters more than the timing. Water at a full boil tears the flesh apart and breaks the skin; keep it at a bare shiver, 175-180F, with the surface barely moving.
- Timing is generous by modern standardsEight to ten minutes per pound suits a fish cooked well past flaking. A stuffed whole fish is safe once the thickest part behind the head reaches 145F, which may come sooner than the stated time, so check early, especially on a fish under 3 lb.
- Rolled crackersThis means plain soda or water crackers crushed to coarse crumbs, not sweet cracker meal. Unsalted saltines or plain dry breadcrumbs stand in directly; count on roughly a cup of crumbs per pound of fish, moistened with melted butter until it just holds together.
- Choosing the fishWhitefish, lake trout, striped bass, salmon or a large whole trout all suit this treatment. A firm-fleshed round fish holds up in the cloth; delicate flatfish does not.
- The clothA clean muslin or cheesecloth square, floured so the flesh does not stick to it, is wrapped around the fish and tied at both ends like a parcel. Leave the twine long enough to use as handles, or set the wrapped fish on a rack you can lift.
- Well-salted waterThe original is vague; about 1 tablespoon of salt per quart is a common proportion for poaching, and some nineteenth-century recipes for boiled fish call for a splash of vinegar as well, said to firm the flesh and keep it white.
- Yield and servingA 4 lb stuffed fish serves six. It was normally sent to table with egg sauce, drawn butter or a caper sauce, since poaching leaves nothing on the fish itself.
Boiling was one of the standard treatments of a whole fish in nineteenth-century American cookery, alongside baking, broiling, and frying, and it survived largely because it let a cook serve a large fish whole and handsome at a time when presentation of the intact creature carried real weight at table. The floured cloth is an old English kitchen device, the same one used for suet puddings, borrowed here to keep the stuffing inside and the skin from shredding. Buckeye Cookery, issued in 1877 by the Buckeye Publishing Company of Minneapolis and grown out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book compiled in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876, gathered contributions from housekeepers across the country and printed their names and towns; Mrs. Farrar's entry from Cleveland, Tennessee is typical of the book's method, a working cook's shorthand that assumes the reader already knows what a rich cracker dressing tastes like and needs telling only the proportions of time.