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Baked Fish (Wash and dry the fish rubbing)
Wash and dry the fish, rubbing inside and out with salt; stuff with forcemeat or bread stuffing and sew. Cut gashes two inches apart on both sides, alternating, and into each slip a narrow strip of salt fat pork. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and place in a hot oven without water. As soon as it begins to brown add hot water and butter and baste every ten minutes. Bake until done, allowing an hour or more for a large fish, twenty or thirty minutes for a small one. Remove to a hot platter; draw out the strings; wipe off all water or fat and remove pork, garnish with slices of lemon well covered with chopped parsley and serve with Hollandaise sauce.
A whole stuffed baked fish in the old style, larded with salt pork because the lean white fish of the period had almost no fat of its own. The method still works; only the temperatures and the doneness test need stating in modern terms.
- The hinge: dry heat firstThe fish goes into the oven with no liquid at all until the skin colors, and only then gets hot water and butter. Adding liquid at the start steams the skin and the flesh slumps; the initial blast is what sets the surface so the fish holds together when it moves to the platter.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. After the fish has taken color, ten to fifteen minutes for most sizes, drop it to 375F for the remaining time so the stuffing heats through without the outside drying.
- Doneness, not clock timeThe hour-or-more figure assumes a large fish and an unreliable range. Cook to 145F at the thickest part of the flesh, and check the center of the stuffing as well; a whole fish may reach that point well before an hour unless it is genuinely large.
- Which fishThis suits a whole round fish of 3-6 lb: striped bass, bluefish, snapper, a large trout, cod or haddock. Have the fishmonger scale and gut it and leave the head on, which holds the shape.
- The salt porkFatback or unsmoked salt pork, cut in strips about the thickness of a pencil. If it is very salty, blanch the strips a minute in boiling water first, since the fish has already been rubbed with salt inside and out. Bacon substitutes but brings smoke the recipe does not intend.
- Sewing and gashingA trussing needle and cotton kitchen twine; leave long tails so the strings pull free in one motion. The gashes should go through the skin and into the flesh but not to the bone; the alternating pattern may help keep the fish from curling as the flesh contracts, though the recipe gives no reason for it.
- StuffingReckon roughly a cup of bread stuffing per pound of fish, packed loosely. Overpacking splits the belly seam as the stuffing swells.
- Basting liquidPerhaps half a cup of hot water with a few tablespoons of butter, added to the pan rather than poured over the fish. Every ten minutes is about right; more often and the oven never recovers its heat.
- YieldA 4 lb whole fish with stuffing serves four to six. Serve the Hollandaise separately in a warmed boat rather than over the fish, which would defeat the crisped skin.
Baked stuffed fish in this form is often said to have been a common American company treatment for a whole fish through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, and the salt pork is the tell: cod, haddock and bass are lean, and before refrigeration made rich fish widely available inland, cooks larded white fish exactly as they larded a lean cut of veal or venison. The technique is generally called piquer, or larding, in French kitchen usage, and the recipe's direction that the strips be pulled out and discarded before serving suggests it may have been valued more for basting than for seasoning. The Hollandaise at the end places the book firmly in its era: the classical French sauces had settled into American domestic-science cookery as the expected finish for a fish course, and loose-leaf cook books of this kind were sold to households aspiring to serve exactly that.