Fish: Roast
To Roast Sturgeon.
Take the tail part, skin and bone it; fill the part where the bone comes from with stuffing, as for a fillet of veal; put buttered paper around it, and tie up like a fillet of veal. Roast, and serve with melted butter.
Flounders Souchet (French recipe).
Take 4 or 6 flounders, trim and cut in halves; put pint water in a sauté pan with a little scraped horseradish, pepper, salt, and sprigs of parsley; place over the fire, boil a minute, then add the flounders, stew ten minutes; take them out and place in a dish, reduce the liquor they were stewed in, pour over and serve.
Hampton Court Perch (English recipe).
Clean the fish, dry well, and make an incision upon each side with a knife. Put 2 tablespoonfuls butter MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK in a sauté pan over a slow fire, lay in the fish, season with salt, and sauté gently. When done, serve with the following sauce: Put 6 spoonfuls melted butter in a stewpan with a little salt and the juice of a lemon; when boiling, stir in the yolk of an egg mixed with a tablespoonful cream. Add small pieces of lemon rind and shredded parsley to the sauce, pour it over the fish, and serve.
Baked Shad Roe. a Skin two large roes, sprinkle with salt, and stand half an hour. In the bottom of a baking pan put a layer of fine bread crumbs mixed with a chopped onion, chopped parsley, 6 chopped mushrooms, melted butter, and a little lemon juice. Lay the roes on the crumbs, sprinkle with more crumbs seasoned and dressed like those in the pan. Over all pour a cupful white stock. Bake half an hour, drain off the liquid, sprinkle the roes with bread crumbs moistened with melted butter, put back in the oven for fifteen minutes to finish 4 cooking and brown. Thicken the liquid that was poured off with flour blended with melted butter, and pour over the roes.
Broiled Brook Trout.
Wash and clean the fish, split and remove the backbone. Put a thin strip of bacon in each fish where the backbone was, fold the fish together, brush with melted butter, and broil over a clear fire. Garnish with fried parsley.
Fish Dressing.
Either of the following recipes may be used to prepare a stuffing for crumbs, 1 cupful mashed potatoes, 1 any fish: 2 cupfuls bread or cracker well-beaten egg, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful sage and savory, or a little thyme, and 1 dozen chopped clams or oysters; moisten with milk, salt, and pepper to taste.
For a plainer dressing, use 1 pint bread crumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, 1 raw egg, pepper, salta and 1 tablespoonful celery seed
Six short recipes from a fish chapter, written for cooks who bought whole fish and boned it themselves. The instructions are sound, but several timings belong to an era when fish was cooked much harder than we cook it now.
- Egg liaison for the perch sauceThe sauce is brought to a boil and then has egg yolk and cream stirred in. Pull the pan off the heat before the yolk goes in and finish it off the fire, or the yolk scrambles and the butter breaks. "Six spoonfuls melted butter" is unqualified in the original; it most likely means tablespoons, the book having used tablespoonfuls earlier in the same recipe.
- SturgeonWild sturgeon is protected or restricted in most places, and sturgeon sold at retail is overwhelmingly farmed; a tail section large enough to bone and stuff is a special order. Sturgeon flesh is firm and meaty, which is presumably why the book treats it like a fillet of veal.
- Buttered paper and tyingSubstitute buttered parchment for the buttered paper, and tie at 1-inch intervals with butcher's twine. The book gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven of about 375F, roughly 20 minutes per pound of stuffed weight, is a workable modern equivalent.
- Ten minutes is too long for flounderFlounder fillets in barely simmering liquid are done in 3 to 4 minutes; half-fish on the bone need 5 or 6. At ten they fall to shreds. Take them out early, then reduce the horseradish broth hard while the fish rests in the serving dish.
- Broiling the trout"A clear fire" means coals that have burned down with no flame or smoke. Under a modern broiler, use the top rack and give a boned 8-10 inch trout about 3 minutes a side. A wire fish basket saves the folded fish from tearing when it is turned.
- Shad roePrick each roe sac in several places before it goes in the pan; the membrane traps steam and the roe can burst. The book gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it, and the second fifteen minutes is browning time only. Shad roe is a spring item and is often sold frozen outside the season.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Unsalted chicken stock works; fish fumet makes it taste more of the sea, which was not the original intention.
- The dressing quantities are garbledThe plain version is clear enough, but the first stuffing has run together in the original setting: read it as 2 cupfuls bread or cracker crumbs, 1 cupful mashed potatoes, 1 well-beaten egg, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, and about a teaspoonful each of sage and savory. A tablespoonful of celery seed in the plainer dressing is a great deal by modern taste; a teaspoon is closer to what most cooks would want.
- YieldsNone are given. The flounders serve 4, the stuffed sturgeon tail 6 to 8 depending on the piece, two shad roes serve 2 to 4, and the stuffing recipes each make enough for one 4-5 lb whole fish.
These pages sit in the part of an American general household book where the compiler was drawing openly on the English and French repertoire, and labelling it as such. "Souchet" is generally traced to the Dutch waterzootje, a fish stewed briefly in its own short broth with parsley and horseradish or ginger; it reached English cookery through the Thames-side taverns at Greenwich, where water souchy of flounder or whitebait was a house specialty for much of the nineteenth century. Hampton Court, likewise on the Thames, was long associated with perch from the river, and the name on a recipe of this sort is generally a gesture at provenance rather than a documented court dish. The shad and its roe, and the brook trout with its strip of bacon, are the native American entries in the group, both tied to a short spring season.