Baked Rock
Boil the fish and take out the bones. Season with cream, butter, pepper, and salt, and grated bread crumbs over the top. Bake slightly in a flat dish or scollop shells.--Mrs. R.
A three-line receipt that assumes you already know how to poach a fish and flake it. The whole dish is a scalloped fish gratin, and its success hinges on how briefly it goes back into the oven.
- What "rock" isRock, or rockfish, is the Chesapeake name for striped bass. Any firm white fish will stand in — black sea bass, cod, or haddock — but striped bass holds its flake better than cod.
- "Boil the fish"Period cookery generally advised a gentle simmer rather than a rolling boil for fish, which shreds the flesh. A 2 lb fillet or a small dressed fish needs roughly 8-12 minutes, until it flakes at the thickest point.
- "Bake slightly"This is the instruction that matters. The fish is already cooked; the oven is only there to set the cream and colour the crumbs. Ten to fifteen minutes in a hot oven, or a few minutes under the broiler, is the whole of it. Longer and the fish turns dry and cottony.
- QuantitiesNone are given, which is normal for the book. For about 2 lb of cooked, boned fish, figure on roughly 3/4 cup cream, 3 to 4 tablespoons butter, and a cup of crumbs over the top.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs grated from stale bread on a box grater, coarser than commercial fine crumbs. Dot them with a little extra butter or they will scorch before they brown evenly.
- Scallop shellsDeep scallop shells were standard individual bakeware in the nineteenth century and are still sold for the purpose; small gratin dishes or shallow ramekins do the same job. Individual portions need less oven time than one large dish — check at ten minutes.
- BonesStriped bass carries a line of pin bones along the fillet. Flaking the cooked fish by hand rather than chopping it is the reliable way to find them all, and it is what "take out the bones" is asking for.
- YieldTwo pounds of cooked, boned fish serves four as a main course, or six to eight in shells as a first course.
Rockfish has been the defining food fish of the Chesapeake since the colonial period, abundant enough that Virginia and Maryland households treated it as everyday rather than special-occasion eating, and this receipt reads accordingly — it is a way of using fish already boiled, most likely yesterday's. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with an initial rather than a name and why so few give quantities: they were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the proportions. The dish belongs to the large nineteenth-century family of "scalloped" preparations, in which cooked meat or fish is bound with cream, crumbed, and browned; serving it in scallop shells is the older practice that is generally said to have given the method its name, and the shells themselves were a standard item of kitchen equipment long before they became a decorative flourish.