Stewed Fish
Cut a fish across in slices an inch and a half thick, and sprinkle with salt; boil two sliced onions until done, pour off water, season with pepper, add two tea-cups hot water and a little parsley, and in this simmer the fish until thoroughly done. Serve hot. Good method for any fresh-water fish.
A plain nineteenth-century fish stew that works on the principle of a court-bouillon built from onion water. A few period conventions need translating before it behaves on a modern stove.
- Teacup measureA teacup in American cookbooks of this era was not a standardised measure; it is commonly reckoned at about six fluid ounces, less than the eight of a modern cup. On that reckoning two teacups is about 1 1/2 cups of liquid, enough to come partway up the fish rather than cover it.
- Cut the fish as steaksSlices an inch and a half thick means cross-cut steaks through the backbone, which suits a large fresh-water fish such as pike, walleye or catfish. Skin-on fillets of similar thickness behave the same way, but thin fillets will fall apart in the pan.
- Do not boil the fishThe hinge of the method is the word simmer. Liquid at a bare tremble keeps the flesh intact; a rolling boil will shred it and drive out the albumin as grey scum.
- Timing"Thoroughly done" reads longer than it needs to. Figure eight to ten minutes per inch of thickness at a simmer, covered. The fish is done when the flesh at the bone loses its translucence and the steaks are opaque throughout.
- Why the onion water is discardedBoiling the onions and pouring off the water removes the sharp sulphurous edge and leaves soft, sweet onion behind. Skipping this step gives a much more aggressive broth.
- Salting"Sprinkle with salt" here reads as a light dry-salting of the cut surfaces before cooking, which firms the flesh. The recipe gives no resting time; a short rest before cooking is all that is implied.
- Yield and servingA two- to three-pound dressed fish will give roughly four or five steaks at this thickness and serve three or four. Serve the pieces in shallow bowls with the onion and cooking liquid spooned over, and something to soak it up.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio households in the 1870s and 80s, and the note at the end -- "good method for any fresh-water fish" -- tells you exactly what kind of book it is. The cook was not buying a named species at a counter; she was dealing with whatever came out of the river, the lake or a neighbour's line, which in the Ohio Valley meant bass, pike, perch or catfish. Hence a recipe organised around a technique rather than an ingredient. The method itself is a stripped-down court-bouillon, the French practice of poaching fish in a seasoned liquid, reduced here to onion, pepper, parsley and water, with no wine and no stock. Cutting a whole fish into thick cross-slices would have made sense when there was no refrigeration and a large fish had to be cooked and eaten the day it was caught, though that is an inference rather than something the book states.