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Baked Bass with Shrimp Sauce
Clean and wipe the fish well and wash inside and out with salad-oil and vinegar. Set on ice for an hour. Cut half a pound of rindless salt pork into very thin slices; lay half on the bottom of the bake-pan, put the fish on them, and then spread the rest of the pork on top of the fish. Pour a little hot water in the pan, cover, and bake for an hour. Baste two or three times with butter and water. Turn out on a hot dish, and set where it will keep hot while you make the gravy.
A whole baked bass insulated top and bottom with salt pork — an old method that bastes the fish from both sides while the covered pan traps steam. It works well provided you stop cooking by temperature rather than by the clock.
- The hinge: an hour is too longThe hinge: an hour is likely too long -- A covered pan with hot water in it cooks a whole fish fast. A 3-4 lb bass is done at 135-140F at the thickest part of the back, usually 30-40 minutes at 375F; the flesh should just part from the backbone. The recipe gives no fish size, and an hour would suit only a considerably larger one.
- Oven settingNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F, covered.
- The oil and vinegar washThe recipe treats this as part of cleaning, though it also seasons. Rub the cavity and skin with oil and a splash of vinegar, then chill on a rack for the hour.
- Salt porkHalf a pound of thin-sliced rindless salt pork for the pan is generous by modern taste. Four to six ounces is enough, and blanching the slices for two minutes takes the edge off. Thin-cut streaky bacon substitutes, but it brings smoke the original does not have.
- BastingButter and water, whisked together warm, two or three times. With a covered pan this matters less than it did in an open one — lift the lid quickly and get it back on.
- SaltDo not salt the fish. The pork provides it, and the pan drippings will be salty enough to need dilution before they go into a sauce.
- YieldA 3-4 lb whole bass serves four generously, allowing for head, bones and skin.
Baking a whole fish under sliced salt pork is a familiar nineteenth-century American method, common in New England cookery, where salt pork was a household fat of first resort and lean fish like striped bass, cod and haddock needed help to stay moist. Shrimp sauce -- a butter-and-flour sauce enriched with the pan liquor and small peeled shrimp -- appears beside boiled turbot and salmon in English books of the period, and such fish-and-sauce pairings were often quoted together as fixed names, the way one wrote "mutton with caper sauce."