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To Bake a Pickerel or Whitefish
Making a stuffing of bread crumbs, butter, pepper, salt, sweet herbs, if preferred, one beaten egg; stuff the fish and sew it, or wind twine around it firmly; lay sticks across the bottom of dripper, to lay the fish on, and bake one and one-half hours slowly. - Mrs Sears, Omaha.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century method that assumes you know how big your fish is and how hot your stove runs. The one thing worth overturning is the time.
- The timing is the problemAn hour and a half will turn any pickerel you can buy today into dry flakes. A whole stuffed fish needs roughly 10-12 minutes per inch of thickness at its deepest point, or until the flesh at the backbone reaches 145F. A 3-4 lb stuffed whitefish is generally done in 40-50 minutes.
- "Slowly"The recipe gives no oven term at all, only the instruction to bake slowly; period guidance for a slow oven ranges roughly from 250F to 325F. Something around 300-325F is a reasonable setting for a stuffed whole fish, since the stuffing needs to catch up with the flesh, but it does not license the hour and a half.
- The dripper and the sticksA dripper is a shallow rectangular roasting pan. The sticks laid across the bottom are an improvised rack that keeps the skin off the metal so the underside does not stew in its own liquid. A wire rack, or a bed of thick onion slices, does the same job.
- PickerelIn American usage of the period this usually means walleye or a small pike rather than the chain pickerel of the East Coast. Both are lean, firm, freshwater fish; walleye, lake trout or any whole 3-4 lb white-fleshed fish substitutes directly.
- Sweet herbsNineteenth-century sweet-herb mixtures commonly drew on parsley, thyme, marjoram and summer savory, sometimes with sage, though the combination varied from book to book. A teaspoon or so of dried herbs total, or a tablespoon chopped fresh, suits a fish this size.
- Stuffing proportionsNone are given. For a 3-4 lb fish, about 2 cups soft bread crumbs, 3 tablespoons melted butter, the beaten egg, salt and pepper, moistened with a spoonful or two of water or stock so it holds together without being wet. Pack it loosely; it swells.
- Closing the fishSewing with a trussing needle and kitchen twine works, but winding twine around the body at two-inch intervals is faster and easier to remove at the table. Metal skewers laced with string do the job too.
- YieldA whole fish of this size serves four, five if the stuffing is generous. Lift the top fillet away from the frame at the table rather than trying to portion through the bones.
Baked stuffed freshwater fish was a staple of many inland American kitchens, where whitefish, walleye and pike came off the ice or out of the river in quantity and had to be cooked whole because that is how they arrived. The attribution to Mrs Sears of Omaha marks this as a contributed recipe, a common format in American community and household cookbooks of the late nineteenth century: a subscriber sent in her method, it was printed close to as written, and the terseness is a sign that the editor assumed every reader already knew what a dripper was and how her own oven behaved. The bread-crumb-and-egg stuffing appears here with no explanation at all.