Fish: Baked
Baked Red Snapper. on. 1 5-pound red snapper, 1 beaten egg, cupful powdered crackers, 1 cupful oysters, 1 teaspoonful onion juice, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful paprika, 1 tablespoonful minced parsley.
Draw, clean, and wipe the fish; rub inside and out with salad oil and lem- Make a stuffing of egg, cracker, oysters (drained and chopped), onion juice, butter, salt, paprika, and parsley; moisten with cream and oyster liquor. Fill the fish and sew it up.
Put a layer of minced fat pork on the covered roaster, lay a few slices of tomato and onion on the pork, then the fish on this. Dredge with salt and flour, and put on more minced pork.
A whole stuffed snapper baked in a covered roaster, in the style of turn-of-the-century American fish cookery. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill in what it leaves out.
- Oven and timeThe original gives no oven setting or time at all. For a stuffed 5 lb fish, something in the region of 350F for about 50 to 60 minutes is a reasonable modern reading, covered for most of that and uncovered for the last 10 to 15 minutes to brown the pork. Because the stuffing contains raw oysters, cook until the flesh at the thickest part behind the head flakes from the bone and the stuffing itself reaches 145F.
- The oysters are the hingeThey go into the stuffing raw and chopped, and they will finish cooking inside the fish. Do not pre-simmer them to firm them up; oysters given more than a couple of minutes of direct heat turn to rubber, and here the long bake is already at the edge of what they tolerate.
- Powdered crackersPlain soda crackers or water biscuits crushed fine, not seasoned cracker meal and not breadcrumbs, which absorb differently. The number before "cupful" is missing from the text; a cupful is the likely reading, and it is worth holding a little back until you see how wet the oyster liquor and cream make the mixture.
- Minced fat porkSalt pork or unsmoked fatback, finely chopped. It bastes the fish from below and above as it renders. Blanch it briefly in water first if it is very salty, since the recipe also calls for a teaspoonful of salt in the stuffing.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. It gives flavour without pieces of onion in a delicate stuffing.
- Sewing the fishA large needle and plain cotton kitchen twine, whip-stitched through the belly flaps. Metal skewers laced with twine work as well and come out more easily. Remove the thread before serving.
- The covered roasterAn oval covered roasting pan, lidded. A heavy baking dish with a well-sealed foil cover does the same job; the point is to trap steam so a lean fish does not dry out.
- ServingA 5 lb snapper with stuffing serves six generously. Lift it onto the platter with two spatulas or the pan's rack, and spoon the tomato, onion and pork from the bottom of the roaster over the top.
Red snapper was the prestige fish of the Gulf Coast trade in the nineteenth century, shipped north on ice by rail from Pensacola and Galveston in quantity, which is why a whole one appears so confidently in a general household manual rather than only in Southern cookbooks. The oyster stuffing is the older habit at work: oysters were cheap and abundant on both coasts through the 1800s, and cooks used them the way later generations used mushrooms, as a savoury bulking agent in forcemeats, sauces and pies. The bed of minced fat pork under and over the fish is a standard device of the period for keeping a lean-fleshed fish moist in a dry oven, the same reasoning behind larding a roast, and it fell out of use as thermostatic ovens and covered pans made scorching less of a worry.