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Baked Sheep's-Head
Put the fish in a pan and cover with water; put a little parsley, onions, and fat bacon, chopped up together, black pepper and salt, in the fish and over it, and when nearly done, beat up one egg and a little flour, and pour over it to thicken the gravy. Rock or shad may be cooked the same way.--Mrs. D. Baked Sheep's-head.
When ready for cooking, salt and pepper well, gash the sides in three or four places. Cut four onions very fine, to which add one pint bread crumbs, fat meat minced very fine, as it suits better than lard, cayenne pepper, thyme, a little salt, and the yolks of two eggs, all mashed together, with which stuff the fish inside and gashes on the outside. Then sprinkle over with flour and black pepper; put into a large pan with one quart cold water. Bake two hours, slowly. Serve with or without sauce, according to taste.--Miss F. N.
Two recipes have run together in this page: a stewed fish from Mrs. D. and Miss F. N.'s stuffed baked sheepshead. The second is the one the title belongs to, and it is a whole fish braised in a shallow bath of water rather than a dry roast.
- Two hours is the thing to changeA stuffed whole fish of 3-4 lb (the recipe gives no size) is done in 35-50 minutes at 375F, when the flesh at the backbone flakes and reads 135-140F. Two slow hours will leave you with dry, cottony flesh; the long time may reflect the uneven heat of a wood range, though the recipe itself says nothing about why.
- "Slowly" in oven termsThe recipe gives no temperature; modern equivalences for a period slow oven vary, and roughly 300-325F is the usual estimate. If you want to follow the spirit of the recipe, bake at 325F and judge by the fish, not the clock.
- The fish itselfSheepshead here means Archosargus probatocephalus, the Atlantic and Gulf porgy with the notoriously human-looking teeth, not the freshwater drum sometimes called by the same name. It is firm and sweet and holds up to stuffing; porgy, black sea bass, red snapper or a small striped bass all behave similarly. "Rock" in Virginia usage is striped bass.
- "Fat meat"Salt pork or fatback, minced fine. The note that it "suits better than lard" is about texture as much as flavor: the little cubes baste the stuffing from within. Rinse and pat dry salt pork before mincing, and go light on the added salt.
- The gashesThree or four cuts in the sides, as the recipe says, let heat in and hold the stuffing that is pressed into them. That may be why the fish cooks faster than its bulk suggests, and it is a reason to start checking it at about 30 minutes.
- The quart of cold waterThis is a braise in a shallow pan, not a roast. The liquid keeps the belly stuffing moist and gives you a broth to reduce; a quart in a large pan should come no more than half an inch up the fish. Baste two or three times.
- Egg yolks in the stuffingThe two yolks bind a pint of crumbs into something that will not crumble out of the gashes. Mix the stuffing while the fish comes to room temperature and pack it loosely; densely packed crumb stuffing takes longer to heat than the fish takes to cook.
- YieldA 3-4 lb fish stuffed this way serves four, five if there is a soup before it. The obvious sauce, if you want one, is the pan liquid reduced and thickened as in Mrs. D.'s stewed version above.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, is a collection of contributed receipts, which is why the page carries initials rather than a single author's voice. Sheepshead was a staple of Chesapeake and tidewater tables through the nineteenth century, common enough at market to need no introduction and substantial enough to be stuffed with a pint of bread crumbs. The fish's name is generally traced to its blunt, broad incisors, and the practice of gashing the sides and forcing stuffing into the cuts is a familiar method for whole baked fish. Its later scarcity in the upper Chesapeake, and the shift of the name "sheepshead" onto the freshwater drum in inland markets, is why the dish reads as unfamiliar today even where the recipe is entirely straightforward.