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Loiled White Fish
Dress the fish nicely, and cover in fish-kettle with boiling water seasoned well with salt; remove the scum as it rises, and simmer, allowing from eight to ten minutes time to every pound; when about half done, add a little vinegar or lemon juice, take out, drain, and dish carefully, pouring over it drawn butter; or garnish with sprigs of parsley, and serve with egg-sauce. - Mrs. M. Smith, Pittsburgh.
A plain poach of the sort every Great Lakes household knew, written for a cook who already owned a fish kettle and knew what drawn butter was. Two things need translating: the equipment and the cooking time.
- The title is a typesetter's slip"Loiled" is Boiled. The method described is not a boil at all but a gentle simmer, which is what matters.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge of the dish. A rolling boil tears whitefish apart and squeezes out the fat that makes it worth eating. Hold the water at a bare shiver, barely a bubble breaking, from the moment the fish goes in.
- Fish kettleA long, narrow, lidded pan with a perforated rack that lifts the whole fish out unbroken. A roasting pan set across two burners works, with the fish laid on a doubled sheet of cheesecloth whose ends serve as handles.
- The timing is too longEight to ten minutes per pound suits a large whole fish poached on the bone. Judge by thickness instead: roughly 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, and cook until the flesh is opaque and parts from the bone. A three-pound whitefish will usually be done well short of the half hour the rule implies.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter. In American books of this period drawn butter is a light flour-and-butter sauce loosened with water or fish liquor, closer to a thin béchamel. Roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid, seasoned with salt and a little lemon.
- Egg-sauceDrawn butter with two or three hard-cooked eggs chopped into it, sometimes with parsley. The standard partner to boiled fish across nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery.
- The vinegar or lemonAdded halfway through. Cooks of the period held that a little acid kept the flesh white and firm. A tablespoon or two per gallon of water is plenty.
- Salt the water properly"Seasoned well with salt" means well-salted water, not a token pinch. About a tablespoon of salt per quart is a workable modern reading.
- YieldA whole whitefish of three to four pounds serves four to six as a main course. Skim the scum diligently in the first few minutes or it settles back onto the skin.
Whitefish from the Great Lakes was the everyday fine fish of the Midwest when the compilation behind Buckeye Cookery was made in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876-77 by Estelle Woods Wilcox, though the book was reissued and expanded through the 1880s. Boiling — really poaching — was the standard treatment for any large whole fish in the period, and the accompaniments here are entirely conventional: drawn butter and egg-sauce appear beside boiled cod, halibut and salmon in nearly every American cookbook of the century. What makes this entry characteristic of the Buckeye is the byline. The book was assembled from contributions solicited from women across Ohio and the neighboring states, each recipe printed over its author's name and town, so the volume reads as a directory of a regional cooking network as much as a manual.