Eleanor Woodruff
OVEN-BROILED BLACK BASS
Select a black bass weighing about three pounds.
Split the fish as for broiling, and remove the bonesworking from the inside and using a dull knife. Place thick brown paper in a dripping pan, lay the fish on it, skin-side down, and dust with salt and pepper; dot with bits of butter, using two tablespoonfuls.
Bake in a hot oven, allowing eight minutes to the pound. When done, slip a broad knife between the flesh and skin, and slide onto a platter. The skin will adhere to the paper. Mackerel may be broiled in the same way.
A plain oven-broiling method whose only real trick is the paper: it takes the skin off the fish so the flesh lifts away clean. Everything else is timing.
- The hinge — the paperUse unbleached parchment, not modern brown paper bags or butcher paper, which may carry inks, glues or recycled fibre. The paper's job is to bond to the skin so the cooked flesh slides free; parchment does this just as well and is rated for oven heat.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F in period usage. Note that parchment scorches near 450F, so the lower end of that range is the sensible choice for an uncovered sheet in a shallow pan.
- Eight minutes to the poundTwenty-four minutes for a three-pound fish is generous for a split, boned, flat piece. Start checking at twelve to fifteen minutes; the flesh should just flake and read 145F at the thickest part. Whole-fish timings assume a much thicker cross-section.
- Black bassLargemouth and smallmouth bass are game fish and in most US states cannot legally be sold, so this is an angler's recipe. Striped bass, branzino, walleye or a split trout of similar weight behave the same way under the paper.
- Dripping panA shallow roasting pan or a rimmed baking sheet. Nothing deep, or the fish steams in its own butter rather than browning.
- Splitting and boningButterfly the fish along the backbone and work the rib and pin bones out from the flesh side, as the recipe directs. The dull knife presumably pushes bones free without slicing into the fillet, though the recipe does not say why.
- ButterTwo tablespoons over a three-pound fish is light. Dot it evenly and baste once partway through if the surface looks dry; there is no liquid in the pan to protect it.
- YieldA three-pound whole fish feeds three to four once head, frame and skin are gone. Serve with lemon and the pan butter poured over.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries collected recipes contributed by stage performers of the 1910s. Black bass belongs to a distinctly American strand of that cooking: by the early twentieth century most states had classed largemouth and smallmouth bass as game fish and barred their sale, so a recipe for one presumes a household with access to a rod and a lake, or friends who had. The paper-lining trick turns up in general cookbooks of the period as a way to skin oily and delicate fish alike, and the closing line about mackerel is the giveaway that the writer thought of it as a technique rather than a single dish.