Home › Fish › STUFFING (Teaspoon finely chopped)
STUFFING (Teaspoon finely chopped)
1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley 1 tablespoon chopped pickles 1 teaspoon salt, few drops onion juice to cup milk or water Melt butter, add remaining ingredients, and stir lightly with a fork until heated through. If a dry stuffing is preferred, omit liquid.
Wash and wipe bluefish, stuff, and sew. Cut three gashes on either side of fish and insert a slice of salt pork in each gash (if desired fancy, pink the edges of the salt pork). Season with salt and pepper, brush with melted butter, and dredge with flour. Place on a greased fish sheet, or on two four-inch-wide pieces of cheese cloth. Set in dripping pan, surround with finely chopped pork; bake, allowing fifteen minutes to the pound; baste with salt pork fat. There should be sufficient in the pan; if not, try out an additional quantity of pork.
When the fish is browned on one side, it should be turned, basted and browned on the other. To avoid this turning, many prefer to skewer the fish in the shape of the letter S, and place as if swimming in the pan.
This entry is a stuffing plus a full method for baked bluefish, and the ingredient list as printed is defective — the fat and the crumbs that make up the bulk of the stuffing have dropped out of the column. Read it as a technique rather than a formula.
- The missing ingredientsBread stuffings of this period generally run in the region of a cup of soft crumbs to a couple of tablespoons of butter, with the parsley, pickle, salt and onion juice as given; the exact proportions here cannot be recovered. Without crumbs there is nothing to bind, so supply them from any standard bread stuffing before you start.
- "to cup milk or water"Another typesetting casualty — the fraction is gone. It cannot be recovered honestly; add liquid a spoonful at a time until the crumbs just hold together, and note the recipe itself says to omit it entirely for a dry stuffing.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. It gives the flavour without visible pieces, which is the point in a pale crumb stuffing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in this instruction. Bake fish of this kind at about 400F; hot enough to brown the salt pork and flour dredge before the flesh dries.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundGenerous by modern standards. A stuffed 4-pound bluefish will be done in 40-50 minutes; go by the flesh flaking at the backbone, or 145F at the thickest part, rather than by the clock.
- Salt pork and lardingThe gashes and inserted pork slices are self-basting for a fish that, despite being oily, was often cooked past dryness. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon substitutes. "Pink the edges" means to cut them with a notched or zigzag edge, purely for looks.
- Fish sheet and cheeseclothA fish sheet was a metal sheet with handles, often perforated, used to lift the whole fish out intact. Two long strips of cheesecloth, or a sheet of foil with the edges left long, do the same job -- a stuffed fish will break if you attack it with a spatula.
- Turning versus the SSkewering the fish into an S so it sits on its belly, as the note suggests, is the better course: it browns evenly without being flipped, and the stuffing stays where it was put. Trussing needles or metal skewers through head, middle and tail hold the curve.
- YieldA 4-pound bluefish, stuffed, serves four to six. Bluefish is strongly flavoured and does not keep well cooked; plan to eat it the same day.
Bluefish baked and stuffed was an Atlantic seaboard staple in the decades around 1900 — the fish ran off the New England and Middle Atlantic coasts, sold cheaply, and appears constantly in Eastern cookbooks of the period. The larding with salt pork is the older English and colonial answer to any fish or lean meat going into a dry oven, and it survived here even though bluefish is oily enough not to need it. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house-branded cookbooks of the era it padded its chocolate recipes out with a full general cookery course; the fish chapter reflects Boston market habits and the Fannie Farmer school of precise domestic-science instruction, right down to the ornamental pinking of the pork.