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Savory Stuffed Fish
1 cup crumbs 1 onion grated 1 cup crabmeat seasoning 1 egg beaten cream to moisten 1 tablespoon shortening Have any baking fish liked prepared for stuffing or, preferably, buy three-pound chunk cod-butt, from shoulders. Boil as usual, but only ten minutes; lift and open carefully and remove bones. Have ready stuffing made of ingredients above cutting the shortening in last. Stuff fish, close it and lay on greased baking pan, baste with shortening and cook in oven twenty-five minutes. Serve Drawn Butter Sauce with fish. Serves 6.
A 1930s dinner-party fish: a whole or thick-cut piece of cod parboiled just long enough to loosen the frame, boned, packed with a crab and crumb stuffing, and finished in the oven. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own fishmonger, so both need pinning down.
- The hinge: ten minutes means ten minutesThe initial boil exists only to let you lift the flesh off the bones intact, not to cook the fish. Cod at a bare simmer for much longer than ten minutes will flake apart and you will lose any chance of stuffing it.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given, as was normal for the period. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits the dish. Do not rely on the twenty-five minutes alone: check with a thermometer for the 145F the USDA now recommends for fish, probing the stuffing as well as the flesh, since the crab and egg filling is the slowest part to heat and may need more time than the recipe allows.
- Cod-buttThe "butt" or shoulder cut is the thick end of a split cod behind the head, the piece with the most even depth. Ask for a three-pound centre-cut or shoulder loin section, skin on, bone in; skin and bone are what hold the parcel together while it parboils.
- CrumbsThe recipe does not say which kind. Dry crumbs from stale bread, rather than the fine sandy commercial sort or fresh soft crumbs, will absorb the cream without collapsing, which suits an instruction that gives cream only 'to moisten' rather than by measure.
- Shortening, twiceOne tablespoon is cut into the stuffing cold, in the manner of pastry, so it melts and enriches from within. The basting fat is additional and unmeasured; allow two or three more tablespoons, and butter is the better choice for flavour here.
- CrabmeatA cup is roughly six ounces. Pasteurised lump crab from a tub works; pick it over for shell fragments, since the stuffing is not something you can fish bits out of later.
- Drawn butter sauceNot clarified butter, despite the name. In American books of this period it means a light white sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux thinned with the fish cooking liquid or hot water, then finished with more butter. Save a cup of the poaching water for it.
- Closing the fishKitchen twine or a few skewers will hold the stuffed piece shut better than nothing; the recipe simply says "close it." Bake it seam-side down on the greased pan.
- YieldSix as written, as one of several courses. On its own with a starch and a vegetable it feeds four generously.
This comes from the era when the "company dinner" menu was a printed genre of its own, and stuffed fish was a reliable centrepiece: cheaper than a roast, impressive at table, and stretched by a filling that carried the expensive ingredient. Cod shoulder was among the less glamorous cuts of an abundant Atlantic fish, so the cook's craft lay in dressing it up — hence the crab, the cream, and the drawn butter sauce poured over. Drawn butter was a standard American fish sauce for a long stretch of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before hollandaise and lemon-butter displaced it, and its name is generally traced to the older English sense of "drawn" meaning melted or drawn out, even though the sauce as made in the United States had long since acquired flour. The two-stage method here, poach to bone and then bake to finish, answers a problem that receded with the fillet counter: fish was far more often bought whole then than now, and getting the skeleton out without destroying the fish was a routine kitchen skill.