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Fish, to Cook, in Oven
Clean and trim any small fish; put them into a deep pan, with a gill of vinegar, half a pint of melted butter, and two onions chopped small; lay in with the fish a seasoning of two tea-spoonfuls of salt and one of pepper. Bake, turning occasionally till done. Serve with the sauce in the dish. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Sufficient for six pounds of fish.
A plain baked-and-basted fish dish from the era before anyone printed an oven dial number. Two things need settling before you start: how much liquid you actually want, and what "melted butter" meant to a Victorian cook.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butter"Melted butter" is usually a sauce, not butter -- In Cassell's and its contemporaries, "melted butter" generally means the standard English melted-butter sauce: butter thickened with a little flour and water or milk. Read instead as half a pint of plain liquid butter, you would be poaching six pounds of fish in fat, so the sauce is the likelier reading -- though here it goes into the pan with the fish and vinegar, and the recipe says only to serve "with the sauce in the dish."
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or a scant 2/3 cup. Half a cup is close enough for vinegar in a dish this size. Use cider or white wine vinegar rather than harsh malt.
- No temperature is givenTreat this as a moderate oven, 350-375F. Hotter and the vinegar and butter reduce to a scorched glaze before the fish is through.
- The timing is for small fish onlyTwenty minutes suits whole herring, smelts, small mackerel or fillets laid in a single layer. "Sufficient for six pounds of fish" describes the quantity of seasoning and liquid, not six pounds crowded into one pan; bake in batches or shallow layers or nothing cooks evenly. The practical test is that the flesh parts cleanly from the bone; current food-safety guidance is 145F internal, though many cooks pull fish lower than that.
- Baste rather than turnTurning small whole fish repeatedly in a hot pan breaks them up. Spooning the pan liquid over them once or twice is gentler, though the recipe as written does tell you to turn them occasionally.
- SaltTwo teaspoons of salt and one of pepper are pitched at six pounds of fish. Scale down proportionally for a smaller batch, and season the cavity of whole fish rather than the surface alone.
- The panA "deep pan" here means an ovenproof dish deep enough to hold the liquid, not a roasting tin. Ceramic or enamelled cast iron; the vinegar will pit bare cast iron and dull aluminium.
- ServingSix pounds of fish feeds eight to ten as a main course. The pan juices are the sauce, sharp with vinegar and onion; strain them if you want them smooth, or leave the onion in.
Baking fish in a vinegar-and-onion bath belongs to the same family as the old soused or pickled fish of English cookery, where herring and mackerel were cooked in spiced vinegar partly for flavour and partly because the acid helped them keep a few days in a cool larder. Oily small fish spoil fast, and before domestic refrigeration a sharp cooking liquor was doing real work. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery collected this kind of instruction in its hundreds for a late-Victorian household audience, and the recipe is written around a quantity of fish rather than a number of servings. The absence of an oven temperature is equally of its period, since a cook was judging a coal range by hand and by experience, not by a dial.