Boiled Fish
Sheep's head, whitefish, flounders, in fact all large fish may be boiled according to the following recipe :- (32) Wash the fish well and quickly in cold water, wipe carefully and sprinkle thickly with salt, wrap in a piece of cheese cloth sufficiently large to envelop the fish. Sew the edges so that there will be but one thickness of cloth over any part of the fish. Lay in the bottom of a-large saucepan, cover with boiling water, add a tablespoonful of salt, a slice of onion, a bay leaf, and a sprig of parsley. Simmer very gently ten minutes to each pound of fish, or if you have a fish kettle, simply place the fish on the perforated slide without wrapping in cloth. Take the fish from the water the moment it is done, drain, remove the cloth carefully, turn the fish onto the plate; garnish with slices of lemon and parsley. Serve with Sauce Hollandaise. Cold boiled fish left over may be utilized in making salads, chops, or à la crémes.
A court-bouillon poach dressed up as boiling. The single most important change is the heat: the water should never actually boil, and the timing given here is roughly twice what a modern cook would use.
- Sheep's head means sheepsheadThe fish intended is the sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus), an Atlantic porgy relative, not a sheep's skull. Any firm large fish works: whole snapper, striped bass, salmon, or thick cod fillet.
- Ten minutes to the pound is too longJudge by thickness instead: about 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, and pull the fish at an internal temperature of 145F, when the flesh just parts from the bone.
- "Simmer very gently" means no bubblesHold the water at 170-180F, barely trembling. A true simmer shreds the surface of the fish and drives albumin out in white curds.
- The cheesecloth is structuralIt exists so a whole fish can be lifted out in one piece. Sew it snugly, leave long tails at each end as handles, and if you own a fish kettle with a perforated insert, skip the cloth entirely as the recipe says.
- Salting twiceThe thick sprinkle of salt before wrapping seasons the flesh; the tablespoon in the pot seasons the cooking water. With a modern fine salt, use a light hand on the fish itself.
- Sauce HollandaiseThe recipe assumes a hollandaise given elsewhere in the book. Make it after the fish goes into the water and hold it warm off direct heat, since it will break if it gets much hotter than about 180F.
- YieldAllow about 8 oz of whole fish or 5-6 oz of fillet per person, so a 3 lb whole fish serves four to six.
- The leftovers"Chops" here means the flaked fish bound with a thick sauce, shaped, breaded and fried, close kin to the croquette. "A la cremes" are the same flakes in a cream sauce, baked or served in shells. Refrigerate the cooked fish promptly and use it within two days.
Boiled fish with hollandaise was a common warm-weather centerpiece of the late-Victorian American table, and poaching suits hot-weather cookery: it adds no fat, heats the kitchen far less than a roast, and produces a dish that is as good cold as hot, which mattered in households without reliable refrigeration. Sheepshead, named for its blunt, oddly human-looking teeth, was a common market fish along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the nineteenth century and appears frequently in cookbooks of the era, though it is now largely a recreational catch. The instruction to sew the fish into a single thickness of cloth does the work a professional fish kettle's perforated slide would do, and the preference for gentle simmering over a rolling boil was already established in print by this time, even as recipes kept the older word "boiled" in their titles.