Dressing For Baked Fish

An ingredient list rather than a method: everything is simply chopped fine and tossed with the crumbs and melted butter, then packed into the cavity of a whole fish before baking. The quantities make roughly a cupful, enough for a 3 to 4 lb fish.

• Read the teaspoon line carefully"1 teaspoonful of minced parsley, capers, pickles, and olives" most likely means a teaspoon of each, though the phrasing could also be read as a teaspoon of the four combined. Taken as a teaspoon of each, that gives about four teaspoons of sharp, salty mince against one cup of crumbs.
• Crumb type decides the textureRecipes of this period often mean soft crumbs torn from the inside of a stale loaf rather than dry commercial crumbs, though this one does not specify. Dry crumbs will drink the butter and set into a dense plug; if that is all you have, use about three-quarters of a cup and add a spoonful or two of stock or cream.
• Salt with restraintCapers, pickles, olives and Worcestershire all carry salt, and the fish is usually salted inside and out as well. Mix the dressing, taste it, and only then decide about the salt called for at the end.
• Drain the pickled thingsCapers, chopped pickle and olives hold a lot of brine. Blot them before mincing, or the crumbs turn to paste and the lemon juice has nothing left to do.
• Oven and timingThe recipe itself gives no oven heat or time. By modern practice a stuffed whole fish bakes well at around 375F, allowing roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, and a little longer for a densely packed cavity. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone has just lost its translucency.
• Closing the fishSkewer the belly shut or lace it with kitchen twine. Loose dressing washes out into the pan and scorches in the butter that renders from it.
• WorcestershireThe optional Worcestershire is doing the work of an anchovy, which nineteenth-century fish sauces used constantly. A scant teaspoon is plenty in a cup of crumbs.