Home › Luncheon Dishes › Stuffing for Fish
Stuffing for Fish
2 C soft bread crumbs ½ t salt 1/8 t pepper 1 t parsley 1 t chopped pickle 2 T butter
A bare ingredient list of the kind church-supper books printed by the hundred, on the assumption that any cook knew what to do with it. A few of the figures need reading with care.
- The saltThe salt reads half a teaspoon for two cups of crumbs, and the printed page gives the same figure. That is a sensible amount; taste the stuffing before it goes into the fish and adjust the seasoning then.
- Soft bread crumbsNot dry packaged crumbs. Tear the crumb of day-old white bread into rough pieces or pulse briefly; two cups packed loosely is roughly three slices. Dry crumbs will absorb far more moisture and give a pasty result.
- Chopped pickleThis means cucumber pickle, sweet or dill from a jar. A teaspoon is a token amount; a tablespoon of finely chopped dill pickle, plus a little of its brine, does the job the recipe is reaching for.
- ParsleyA teaspoon of chopped fresh parsley if you have it, or half that dried. Fresh is closer to the intent.
- ButterMelt the 2 tablespoons and toss it through the crumbs with your fingers rather than working it in cold. That is the whole binding — there is no egg and no stock here, so the mixture should stay loose and crumbly, not wet.
- YieldEnough for one whole fish of 2 1/2 to 4 lb, or for four to six fillets rolled around it. Fill the cavity loosely and close with skewers or ties.
- Baking the stuffed fishThe book leaves this out. A moderate oven, 350–375F, and about 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point; the fish is done at 145F, and the stuffing will have come up with it.
Community cookbooks compiled by church societies worked as shared shorthand among women who already cooked alike. That is why an entry like this gives quantities and nothing else: the proportions were, it seems, the only information worth printing. The chopped pickle marks the period. Commercial cucumber pickles were a cheap pantry staple by the early twentieth century, and cooks used them the way an older generation used lemon or capers, to cut the richness of a baked fish.