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Boiled Rock-Fish
Clean the fish nicely, rub well with salt and pepper. Put into a large deep pan, that it may lie at full length; cover with cold water, adding salt and pepper. Boil steadily for three quarters of an hour; dish and serve with melted butter and sauce or catsup.--Miss F. N.
Boiled Rock-fish.
Clean nicely and hang it up; do not lay it in water, but wash it when ready for cooking. Put on in boiling water seasoning with salt to taste. It takes two hours to boil, if large. Serve with egg sauce, and send to the table in a napkin to keep hot.--Mrs. W.
Two versions of the same dish from two contributors, both written for a whole fish of several pounds and a coal range. The cooking times are the part that needs rethinking.
- Rock-fishIn Virginia usage this is striped bass (Morone saxatilis), a Chesapeake staple, not the Pacific rockfish sold under that name on the West Coast. Any firm white-fleshed whole fish of 4-8 lb behaves the same way here.
- The timing is the hingeThree quarters of an hour, let alone two hours, will reduce the flesh to cotton. Whole fish is generally taken off at about 135-140F in the thickest part (official guidance is 145F), which for a 5 lb fish in barely-shivering liquid may be as little as 25-30 minutes depending on its thickness. Measure rather than time.
- Boil means simmerA hard, rolling boil tears the skin and shreds the flakes. Bring the water up, then hold it just below a simmer so the surface only trembles. The nineteenth-century "boil steadily" reflects the vocabulary, not the ideal.
- The pan"A large deep pan, that it may lie at full length" points to something like a fish kettle, which in this period would have had a perforated lift-out plate. A roasting pan set over two burners works, with the fish on a rack or wrapped in cheesecloth so it can be raised out in one piece rather than broken up with a spatula.
- Cold start versus hotThe two contributors give opposite directions. Miss F. N.'s cold-water start cooks more gently and evenly; Mrs. W.'s boiling-water start sets the exterior and holds the shape better. Either is defensible, but the cold start makes overcooking easier to avoid.
- Season the water properlySalt alone is thin. Salt the water at roughly the strength of a good soup, and if you like, add onion, a bay leaf, parsley stems and a splash of vinegar or white wine, though neither contributor calls for them.
- Melted butter and egg sauce"Melted butter" in this period is a sauce, not a puddle of butter: butter thickened with a little flour and water and beaten smooth. Egg sauce is the same base with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in. Both go grainy if they boil.
- CatsupThe catsup meant here could be mushroom, walnut or tomato, all of which were in use by this date; the mushroom and walnut kinds are thin, dark and savoury. Tomato ketchup as sold now is far sweeter than any period version and will overwhelm the fish.
- Sending it to the tableThe fish is lifted onto a hot platter and sent up with a folded napkin to hold heat on the way from kitchen to dining room. A 5 lb fish serves six to eight.
Striped bass has been called rock or rock-fish on the Chesapeake since the colonial period, and a large boiled one, set out whole under a napkin with egg sauce, appears among the dishes served at Virginia dinners in the spring run. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from named housekeepers across the state, which is why the same dish appears twice with contradictory instructions and different initials attached; the book preserves disagreement rather than editing it away. The direction to hang the fish rather than lay it in water reflects an older conviction, still repeated in period manuals, that soaking drew the flavour out of the flesh.