Baked Fish
Choose a medium sized fish. Have it drawn from the gills without opening. Scrape free from all scales, wash, and wipe dry immediately. Sprinkle well with salt. Make a dressing from one cup of stale bread crumbs, one tablespoonful of melted butter, a half teaspoonful of salt, and a quarter teaspoonful of black pepper; mix well, and stuff the body of the fish. Fasten the gills to the fish with soft twine. Now score one side of the fish with a sharp knife, making the scores about an inch apart. Fill each score with a slice of salt pork. Grease a tin sheet if you have one, put the fish on it, dredge thickly with salt, pepper and flour, place the tin sheet in the bottom of a baking pan, add a half cup of water, place in a hot oven, and bake fifteen minutes to every pound of fish, basting with the gravy in the pan every ten minutes. As the water evaporates add a little more. When done lift the sheet from the pan, and slide carefully into the centre of the dish on which it is to be served. Garnish with slices of lemon, French fried potato balls and parsley. Serve with Sauce Hollandaise in a boat.
A whole baked stuffed fish in the nineteenth-century manner, larded with salt pork and served with hollandaise. The method is sound; the timing is the part that needs rethinking.
- Fifteen minutes to the pound is too longFifteen minutes to the pound is likely to overcook the fish. Judge by thickness instead: roughly 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, until the flesh at the backbone is just opaque and reads 135-140F, carrying over to 145F as it rests.
- "A hot oven"The recipe gives no temperature; in period usage a hot oven is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. At that heat the flour dredge browns and the pork fat renders quickly.
- Drawn from the gillsThe fish is gutted through the gill opening so the belly stays closed and holds the stuffing; the recipe then fastens the gills shut with soft twine. Many fishmongers will not do this; ask, or accept a belly-cavity fish and close it with skewers or a few stitches.
- Salt pork in the scoresThin slivers of salt pork slid into inch-apart cuts baste the fish from inside as they render. Blanch the pork a minute if it is very salty, and cut the pieces no thicker than a coin so they render fully in the time the fish takes.
- Go easy on the saltThe fish is salted, the stuffing is salted, then it is "dredged thickly with salt" again over salt pork. Salt the cavity and the skin lightly and let the pork and the hollandaise carry the rest.
- Stale crumbs, not freshStale means dry crumb from day-old bread, which absorbs the butter and the fish juices without turning to paste. One cup is enough for a modest fish; scale up for anything larger.
- The tin sheet is a serving trickA greased flat sheet set in the roasting pan lets you lift a whole cooked fish out intact. A parchment sling or a length of doubled foil under the fish does the same job and is easier to slide free.
- Water in the panThe half cup is there to make basting liquid and keep the drippings from scorching, not to steam the fish. Keep a shallow film, no more, or the skin will not crisp.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb whole fish serves four, allowing for head, bones and skin. Hollandaise should be made after the fish goes in and held barely warm; it breaks if it gets hot.
Fish suited the season: it came in daily, cooked quickly, and was thought lighter than the roasts and stews of winter. The technique here is older than the book, though. Larding a lean fish with strips of salt pork pushed into scored flesh is a standard American answer to the problem that most white-fleshed fish has no fat of its own, and the same trick is often traced to earlier English cookery, where pike was larded with bacon. The hollandaise and the "French fried potato balls" are the fashionable touch, marking the period when American cookbook writers were steadily borrowing the vocabulary of French restaurant cooking for dishes their readers had been making all along.