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Oyster Stuffing (Cups oysters cup butter)
2 cups oysters 1 cup butter 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 cup cracker crumbs salt pepper Drain oysters; mix crumbs, melted butter and parsley. Season highly with salt and pepper. Sprinkle oysters with salt and pepper and mix with crumbs.
Remove head, tail and bone from haddock. Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Stuff with oyster stuffing and sew. Place on fish sheet or strips of cheese cloth in baking pan, dot with butter, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake, allowing twelve minutes to the pound, basting with melted butter, or after fish is stuffed, place in pan; cover with buttered cracker crumbs and baste. Remove from pan to hot platter; garnish with parsley and pickles, and serve with tomato, Hollandaise sauce, or egg sauce.
This is really two recipes on one page: an oyster stuffing, and directions for the baked stuffed haddock it belongs in. A few things the original assumes you already know.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, which in 1907 meant the cook judged it. Bake at 400F; the twelve-minutes-to-the-pound rule works out about right at that heat for a whole stuffed fish.
- Doneness, not minutesTwelve minutes per pound is a guide from an era before thermometers. Take the fish to 145F at the thickest part of the flesh, and check the stuffing too, since oysters at the centre of a large fish heat slowly.
- Do not pre-cook the oystersThey go into the stuffing raw and drained. Their whole job is to release liquor into the crumbs during baking; anything more than the briefest handling before that and they tighten into rubber.
- The butterA full cup to two cups of oysters and one cup of crumbs is period-rich and will run out of the fish. Half a cup gives a stuffing that still holds together and tastes of oyster rather than fat.
- Cracker crumbsCommon crackers or plain soda crackers, rolled fine, not sweetened crumbs and not fresh breadcrumbs, which soak up the oyster liquor and go pasty. Unsalted saltines crushed to coarse sand are the closest modern match.
- Fish sheet and cheeseclothA fish sheet is a thin metal sheet, often perforated and fitted with handles, used to lift a whole baked fish out intact. Two long strips of doubled cheesecloth laid crosswise under the fish, or a sling of parchment, do the same job.
- Sewing the fishButcher's twine and a trussing needle through the belly flaps, or small metal skewers laced with twine. Cut the thread before serving rather than trying to pull it through cooked flesh.
- Size and yieldThis much stuffing would suit a haddock of roughly 4 to 5 lb, though the recipe names no size and no yield; figure on about six servings. Any surplus can be baked alongside in a small dish, covered, for the last twenty minutes.
- Seasoning"Season highly" is deliberate: oysters and crackers both mute salt. Taste the crumb mixture before the oysters go in.
Oyster stuffing in a baked fish is a habit often associated with New England that survived into print long after oysters stopped being cheap everywhere else. Through the nineteenth century the beds of Long Island Sound and Massachusetts Bay put oysters on ordinary tables in quantity, and cooks used them as a bulking, savoury ingredient rather than a luxury — in turkey dressing, in scallops, in pies, and here inside a haddock, the workhorse groundfish of the North Atlantic fleet. Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it extends well beyond chocolate into a full general household manual. The fish chapter is standard Boston cooking-school material of the day: whole fish, cracker-crumb stuffings, and a choice of Hollandaise or egg sauce poured over the top.