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Boiled Fish (Steamed in a Cloth)
Dredge the prepared fish with flour.
Wrap in a cloth. Put in a steamer or in boiling water. When done, take from the kettle, drain, place upon a hot platter, remove the cloth, garnish with lemon points and sprigs of parsley and serve with drawn butter egg sauce. medium-sized fish will boil in half an hour, and when sufficiently cooked will flake and separate easily. Emma P.
Ewing.
A cooking-school method for keeping a whole fish intact through cooking, from the era when "boiled fish" almost never meant a rolling boil. The cloth is the whole point of the recipe.
- The cloth is the hingeWrap the fish loosely in a double layer of damp cheesecloth or a clean cotton tea towel, leaving long ends to use as handles. This is what lets you lift a whole cooked fish out without it breaking apart, and it is the point of the method.
- Do not actually boilThe original says "boiling water", but for a whole fish hold the water at a bare shiver, 160-180F, with the surface barely moving; a hard boil tears the flesh. The original offers a steamer as an alternative, without saying why.
- TimingHalf an hour suits a whole 3-4 lb fish. Reckon on roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, and cook until the flesh flakes and separates easily, as the original says. Fillets and steaks need 5-8 minutes, nothing like thirty.
- "Prepared fish"Assumed to be scaled, gutted, gills out, fins trimmed, head on. A fishmonger will do this; ask for the head left on, since it holds the shape and adds body to the poaching liquid.
- Season the waterThe recipe salts nothing. Plain water gives plain fish. Use well-salted water, or a quick court bouillon of water with a splash of vinegar or white wine, sliced onion, bay, peppercorns and parsley stems.
- The flour dredgeThe recipe does not say why; a thin coat presumably firms the outer surface and helps hold the skin together inside the cloth. Shake off the excess or it will turn to paste against the fabric.
- Drawn butter egg sauceNineteenth-century drawn butter is a white sauce built on butter, flour and the fish liquor or water, not clarified butter as the term means today. The egg version has hard-boiled egg chopped through it. A hollandaise or a lemon butter sauce serves the same purpose.
- Lemon pointsLemon wedges cut lengthwise into narrow spears. Serving suggestion, not a technique.
- YieldA 3-4 lb whole fish feeds four, or six as part of a larger meal.
Emma P. Ewing was one of the professional cooking-school teachers whose names carried real weight in American household books of the 1870s-90s; she is generally associated with the Chautauqua cooking school and with instruction at agricultural colleges, and she wrote several slim volumes on single subjects, including salads and bread. Recipes credited to such figures were a selling point for compilations like this one, lending the authority of a classroom to a domestic manual. The dish itself belongs to a long European tradition of poaching large whole fish " salbass " salmon, cod, halibut, bass " and the cloth wrapping is an alternative to the perforated kettle rack, addressing the same problem: how to get several pounds of cooked, fragile fish onto a platter in one piece. That whole poached fish, glossy and garnished, was a set-piece of the Victorian dinner table explains why the instructions dwell as much on presentation as on cooking.