Fish: Serve
Grease small timbale molds with butter, and line the bottoms with paper; garnish with chopped truffle, mushrooms, or green peas, or they may be used plain. Fill in the mixture; stand in a baking pan half filled with boiling water; cover the top with greased paper, and bake in a moderate oven twenty minutes. Serve with lobster, shrimp, or oyster crab sauce. -MRS. RORER.
Baked Halibut.
1/2 pound halibut or other white fish 1/2 cupful milk Take a square piece of fish, weighing 5 pounds, wash, wipe dry, and place in the dripping pan with a few thin slices of salt pork on top. Bake one hour; baste with melted butter and water. Stir into the gravy 1 tablespoonful Worcestershire Sauce, juice of 1 lemon, seasoning to taste, and thicken. Serve the gravy separately; garnish with slices of hardboiled eggs. Baked Smelts.
Dip in beaten egg, roll in cracker crumbs, season with salt, pepper, and a little nutmeg, lay on a sheet of buttered paper in a buttered baking pan, put a piece of butter on each fish and bake delicately brown; serve on a hot dish, garnished with slices of lemon and parsley.
Baked Salmon Trout with Cream.
Wipe dry and lay in a pan with enough water to keep from scorching.
Bake slowly an hour, basting with pound halibut or other white butter and water. Into a cupful fish, Whites 5 eggs, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful soft bread crumbs, cupful milk, 6 tablespoonfuls cream, 1 saltspoonful white pepper. cream stir 3 or 4 tablespoonfuls boiling water, add 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter and a little chopped parsley; add it to the gravy from the dripping pan in which fish was baked; lay the trout on a hot platter and let the gravy boil up once, then i FISH pour over the fish; garnish with sprigs of parsley.
Baked Shad.
Stuff with a dressing; rub the fish with flour, lay in a pan with a few thin slices of pork on top. Bake a medium-sized fish forty minutes; add a little hot water, butter, pepper, and salt to the gravy; boil up and serve in gravy tureen. Garnish the fish with sprigs of parsley. A tablespoonful anchovy sauce is a decided improvement in making the gravy.
Brochet of Smelts (French recipe). cover Spread melted butter in bottom of shallow baking dish, dredge with raspings of bread, season with salt, pepper, chopped parsley, and shallots; put in fish and pour over it a teaspoonful anchovy sauce; with melted butter and bread raspings, and bake fifteen minutes. Serve hot; arrange the fish on a napkin, heads to heads, in center of dish, or lay them all one way in rows, each overlapping the next. Garnish with quartered lemon and fried parsley.
Broiled Turbot (English recipe).
Soak the fish in salted water to take off slime; do not cut off fins; make an incision down the middle of the back to prevent skin on the other side from cracking; rub it with lemon and lay in a kettle of cold water; let it boil slowly; when done, drain, and lay on hot napkin; rub a little lobster coral through a sieve, sprinkle it over fish, garnish with sprigs of parsley and sliced lemon. Serve with lobster or shrimp sauce, or plain drawn butter.
Baked Whitefish (Point Shirley style).
Split the fish and lay open with the meat side up. Season with salt and pepper, and place in a baking pan on a bed of chopped salt pork. Bake in a quick oven, brushing it over with beaten egg and milk while cooking.
Just before sending to the table, cover with crisp brown crumbs, made by frying grated bread crumbs in but ter. Serve with oyster sauce.
Crimped Fish.
Cut uncooked fish into long strips, roll them around the finger, and fasten each roll with a wooden toothpick. Put into boiling salted water with 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar, and boil fifteen minutes. Drain, arrange on a platter, and serve hot with oyster or lobster sauce poured into cavities.
Codfish Soused in Oyster Sauce.
Boil 3 slices fish; drain and dress upon a dish; blanch 3 dozen oysters by putting them into a stewpan with their juice; move them around occasionally, but do not let them boil. As soon as they become firm, place a sieve over a basin, pour in the oysters, beard and throw them into their liquor. Put them into a stewpan.
When boiling, add 2 cloves, blade mace, 6 peppercorns and 2 ounces butter, to which you have added a tablespoonful flour. Stir, season with salt, cayenne pepper, and essence of anchovies. Add a gill of cream, and pour the sauce over it.
A run of fish recipes from a period when fish came whole and the cook was expected to know what to do with it. Note that the text is garbled in two places: the ingredient list for Mrs. Rorer's fish timbale (halibut or other white fish, 5 egg whites, salt, bread crumbs, milk, cream, white pepper) has been set into the middle of the Baked Salmon Trout instructions, and the trout recipe is missing its opening. Read those two together before you start.
- Oven temperatures"moderate" is usually taken as about 350F (some period sources up to 375F), "quick" as about 425-450F, and "bake slowly" here as roughly 300-325F. Smelts baked "delicately brown" will take about 10-12 minutes at 400F.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoonful is usually reckoned at about 1/4 teaspoon (some sources give 1/8). "Raspings of bread" are dry crumbs made by grating stale crust — coarse dried breadcrumbs, not panko and not fresh.
- The halibut is overcooked as writtenThe halibut is likely overcooked as written -- An hour risks taking a 5-pound piece of halibut well past done, depending on its thickness. Bake at 400F and pull it at 130-135F at the thickest point, roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness; the salt pork on top is there to keep a lean fish from drying, not to license a long bake.
- Crimped fishFifteen minutes in boiling water will reduce finger-rolled strips of fish to threads. Slip them into barely simmering acidulated water and give them three to four minutes until just opaque.
- The oysters are the hingeIn the soused codfish, the direction "do not let them boil" is the whole technique. Blanched only until firm, they stay plump; brought to a boil they toughen within a minute. "Beard" means trimming off the dark frill of mantle.
- Broiled turbot is not broiledThe method given is poaching: the fish is laid in a kettle of cold water and brought slowly to a boil. Turbot is expensive and often unavailable; a whole halibut, brill or large flounder behaves the same way.
- Coral and oyster crab sauceLobster coral is the roe of a female lobster, sieved and used as a red garnish. Oyster crabs are the pea-sized crabs found inside live oysters, essentially unobtainable now; substitute shrimp or plain lobster sauce.
- Salt pork and anchovyBoth are seasoning as much as fat. Salt pork varies a good deal in saltiness, so hold back on additional salt until you have tasted the pan gravy. "Essence of anchovies" and "anchovy sauce" can be replaced with anchovy paste, about a teaspoon.
- Timbale yieldMrs. Rorer's mixture — the fish quantity is lost in the garbled text, which reads only "pound halibut or other white fish," with five egg whites, crumbs, milk and cream — should fill roughly six to eight small timbale molds. Bake in the water bath at 350F for 20 minutes, until just set, and unmold onto warm plates.
The Mrs. Rorer credited at the top is Sarah Tyson Rorer, who ran the Philadelphia Cooking School and whose books and magazine columns made her one of the most quoted American cooking authorities of the 1880s and 1890s; compilations like this one lifted her recipes freely. The rest of the section is a snapshot of what fish cookery meant in a household with ice but no freezer: shad and smelts in their short spring seasons, whitefish from the Great Lakes, halibut in thick steaks off the cod-fishery boats, and salt pork laid over the leaner fish. The "Point Shirley style" whitefish takes its name from the shore resort on Boston Harbor whose hotels were famous for plainly cooked fish, and the labels "French recipe" and "English recipe" reflect the period's habit of borrowing prestige from continental and London kitchens — brochet, drawn butter, lobster coral sieved over a napkin-lined platter. Oyster crabs, called for in the first sauce, were a genuine delicacy and have largely disappeared from the market with the decline of the wild oyster beds.