Fish
In selecting fish, notice if the flesh is firm and hard, the eyes full and prominent, the scales bright, the fins stiff, and the gills red, as all these indications denote their being fresh. Wash the fish, rub it with salt and pepper, and lay it on a dish, or hang it up till ready to cook. Never keep it lying in water, either in preparing it for cooking, or in trying to keep it till the next day.
In boiling fish, put it in boiling water, and simmer very slowly. It will require an hour to boil a large fish, and about twenty minutes for a small one. Every housekeeper should have a fish-kettle for fish. Be careful to have boiling-hot lard in the frying-pan when you go to fry fish. First rub salt and pepper and flour or meal on the fish, then keep it well covered while frying, as you should do to every thing that is being fried. Doing this will enable you to fry the fish (or other article of food) a pretty amber color, while at the same time it will be perfectly done. Always have a tin sheet for lifting boiled fish and for turning broiled fish. Before broiling, rub with pepper and salt, and then grease with fresh butter. Lay the fish on a gridiron well greased with sweet lard and lay the tin sheet over it. When you wish to turn, take the gridiron from the fire, holding the tin sheet on top the fish. Hold them together, then lay them on a table with the tin sheet down and the gridiron uppermost. Carefully raise the gridiron, leaving the fish lying unbroken on the tin sheet. The cook may now easily slide the fish on the gridiron, put it again on the fire and brown the other side, putting the tin sheet back on top of it. Every thing should be covered while being broiled. When done, lay it on a dish and pour over it melted butter in which has been stirred pepper, salt, and minced parsley. If devilled fish is desired, add to this dressing, one tablespoonful pepper vinegar, one of celery vinegar, one of walnut catsup, one of made mustard, one wine-glassful of acid fruit jelly. In making sauces for fish, never use the water in which the fish has been boiled.
Full directions for stewing fish are to be found in the subsequent pages.
These are general directions rather than a single dish, and one of them — the boiling time — is the part modern cooks should ignore outright.
- Boiling timesAn hour for a large fish and twenty minutes for a small one will give you cotton wool. Fish is done at 135–145F internal, which works out to roughly 8–10 minutes per inch of thickness at a bare simmer; a whole 4 lb fish rarely needs more than 25–30 minutes.
- The fish-kettleA long, narrow pan with a perforated lifting rack. A roasting pan works for a whole fish, or wrap the fish in a double layer of cheesecloth leaving long ends as handles — this is what the "tin sheet" is doing here.
- Sweet lard"Sweet" means fresh and unrancid, not sugared. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point does the job; refined lard is still sold and behaves exactly as described.
- Covering the panKeeping fried fish covered traps steam and softens any crust, which is the opposite of what most cooks want now. Cover it only if you are shallow-frying thick pieces and want them cooked through; leave it open for crisp coating.
- MealCornmeal, and in a Virginia kitchen fine white cornmeal specifically. It remains the standard coating for pan-fried fish through the Tidewater and the South generally.
- The devilled dressingA wine-glassful is about 2 fl oz. "Made mustard" is prepared mustard from the jar, not dry powder. Pepper vinegar is the hot-pepper vinegar still bottled for greens; celery vinegar can be replaced with a teaspoon of celery seed steeped in plain vinegar.
- Walnut catsupA dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, vinegar and spice, once as common as tomato ketchup and now sold mainly by British specialists. Worcestershire sauce or mushroom ketchup is the nearest stand-in.
- Acid fruit jellyRed currant is the likeliest candidate; crabapple or tart quince also fits. A full 2 oz in a butter sauce reads as a great deal of sweetness by current taste, so add it gradually.
- The cooking waterThe instruction to discard it makes sense for a fish simmered in plain water, which leaves a flat, fishy liquid. A properly made court bouillon, or the liquid from a fish poached in wine and aromatics, is worth reducing for sauce.
- Judging freshnessClear full eyes, red gills, stiff fins and firm flesh remain the correct tests for a whole fish. For fillets, which this passage does not address, go by smell and by flesh that springs back rather than holding a dent.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, opens its fish chapter with directions like these because the households it was written for bought fish whole, often straight off a boat or a cart, and had to judge it themselves. The Chesapeake and its tributaries supplied shad, rockfish, herring, croaker and sturgeon in quantities that shaped the regional table, and spring shad runs in particular were a fixed event in the Virginia year. The equipment assumed here — a fish-kettle, a gridiron, a tin sheet cut to size — belongs to open-hearth and early range cooking, where turning a whole fish without breaking it was a real problem requiring a real tool. The devilled dressing, with its walnut catsup and made mustard, is a straightforward inheritance from English cookery, "devilling" meaning a dish sharpened with mustard, pepper and something acid.