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Baked Fish (Open the fish wash wipe)
Open the fish; wash; wipe perfectly dry and rub over with salt; lay in a dripping-pan with a little butter and bread crumbs; and bake forty minutes in the fireless cooker, using both radiators.
A fireless cooker was an insulated box: you heated soapstone or cast-iron discs (the "radiators") on the range until they glowed, dropped them above and below the food, latched the lid and let stored heat do the work. Without one, this becomes a straightforward baked fish, and the numbers below get you there.
- The hinge: dry the fish"Wipe perfectly dry" is the whole technique. A fireless cooker traps every bit of moisture, so a wet fish steams into something grey and slack. In a conventional oven the same rule holds for browning.
- Both radiatorsTwo preheated discs, one under the pan and one above. The recipe calls for both, presumably because a single radiator gave a slower, moister result.
- Oven equivalentA whole fish of 2-3 lb bakes in about 35-45 minutes at 375F, uncovered, in a shallow pan. Fillets need 12-18 minutes. The forty minutes in the original suggests a whole dressed fish.
- Doneness, not clock timeA fireless cooker's heat falls steadily from the moment it is closed, so its timings never map cleanly onto a thermostat oven. Cook to 145F at the thickest point, or until the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone.
- Dripping-panA shallow, low-sided roasting pan. High sides shield the fish from radiant heat and encourage steaming.
- "A little butter and bread crumbs"No quantities are given. For a 3 lb fish, figure 2-3 tablespoons of butter and about half a cup of dry crumbs, scattered over the top so the butter can soak in.
- Open the fishSplit and cleaned; the recipe does not specify scaling or trimming. Your fishmonger will do it. Salting a little ahead of time firms the flesh.
- YieldA 2-3 lb whole fish serves three to four as a main course.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, and cookbooks of the period often carried a chapter of it. The appliance was a hay-box in respectable clothing: a well-insulated chest in which food, heated first on the range, finished cooking on retained heat while the cook left the kitchen and the coal fire went out. Its selling points were fuel economy, a cool kitchen in summer, and freedom from watching the stove, all of which mattered more in a house running a wood or coal range than in one with gas. The soapstone or iron radiators, heated red on the stovetop and slipped in above and below the pan, were what allowed the box to do dry-heat work such as baking rather than only slow-simmering soups and cereals. The spread of thermostatically controlled ranges and ovens, gas as well as electric, gradually made the whole category redundant, and by the 1930s the fireless cooker had largely disappeared from cookbooks, though the principle survives in the modern insulated thermal cooker.