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Stuffing for Baked Fish
No. 1 1 cup cracker crumbs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon chopped onions 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon capers 1 teaspoon chopped pickles 3 tablespoons melted butter This is sufficient for a fish weighing four to six pounds. No. 2 1 cup bread crumbs 1 tablespoon minced onion 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 egg Soak bread in cold water, when soft press out all the water; fry onion in butter, add the bread, parsley and seasoning. Add the beaten egg at last. No. 3 1/2 cup lean veal 1/8 lb. fat bacon 1/4 cup bread crumbs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon onion 1 teaspoon parsley Chop the meat very fine, add the bread crumbs soaked and pressed, and the seasonings.
Three stuffings for a whole baked fish, given in the terse style of an early twentieth-century flour-company pamphlet. All are dry-ish mixtures meant to be spooned loosely into the cavity, not packed.
- Cracker crumbsAt this period this meant plain soda crackers or water biscuits crushed fine, not seasoned crumbs from a canister. Roughly 20 to 28 saltines, crushed, gives a cup depending on how fine you go.
- Bread crumbs, soakedNo. 2 and No. 3 want stale crumb from a loaf, soaked in cold water and squeezed nearly dry. Commercial dry crumbs will not work here; they turn to paste. Tear up day-old bread instead.
- The hinge: pack it looselyThe crumb mixtures absorb fish juices and swell, so fill the cavity around three-quarters and close it with skewers or a few stitches of kitchen twine rather than packing it tight.
- Oven and donenessThe book leaves the baking to the fish recipe. A stuffed 4-6 lb whole fish takes a moderate to fairly hot oven, 375-400F, and is done when the thickest flesh reaches 145F. Check the stuffing itself as well, since No. 2 and No. 3 contain egg and raw meat.
- No. 3 contains raw veal and baconThis is a forcemeat, not a crumb stuffing, and it must reach 165F in the center. That usually means baking the fish a little longer than you would unstuffed, or cooking the stuffing separately in a small dish.
- Capers and picklesNo. 1 is the sharp one, and suits an oily fish such as bluefish, mackerel or shad. Drain and chop the capers; the recipe specifies only "chopped pickles," so a firm cucumber pickle works better here than a sweet relish.
- ButterThree tablespoons for a cup of cracker crumbs is right for No. 1, which has no egg and relies on fat for cohesion. Do not cut it back or the filling stays powdery.
- YieldEach comes to roughly a cup. The book gives the four-to-six-pound figure for No. 1 only, though the other two are of similar bulk. Doubling is straightforward.
Whole stuffed baked fish was standard middle-class fare when fish arrived at market whole, gutted but otherwise intact, and the cook was expected to know what to do with the cavity. The three versions here map onto a familiar hierarchy: cracker crumbs for the plainest and quickest, soaked bread with egg for a softer bound stuffing, and a veal-and-bacon forcemeat for the most ambitious, which resembles the French farce tradition that American cookbooks of the period drew on freely. The compressed telegraphic style of these pages assumed a reader who already understood how to bake a fish and needed only proportions.