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Baked Lake Trout
After cleaning, tie the fish in a square of cheesecloth, immerse in boiling water and flavor with lemon juice. Place in the cooker and cook one hour with one radiator, or longer if no radiator is used .
Drain and serve with cream sauce.
This is a retained-heat recipe, written for a fireless cooker rather than a stove. The method translates cleanly to a covered pot, but only if you understand what the original equipment was doing.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box that held a pot in a nest of packing so food continued cooking on stored heat after being brought to the boil on the range. Nothing inside the box produced heat; a radiator simply added more stored heat, so the temperature falls steadily from the moment the lid closes.
- "One radiator"A soapstone or cast-iron disc heated red-hot on the stove and set under or over the cooking vessel to extend the hot period. One radiator meant a single disc; "longer if no radiator is used" means relying on the heat in the water alone, which drops fast. A heavy Dutch oven with the burner set to its lowest is the nearest modern equivalent.
- The hinge: use a thermometerRetained-heat cooking gives no visual cue that the food ever got hot enough. Take the fish to 145F at the thickest part before you call it done, and do not extend the hold time to compensate for a cool cooker; bring it back to a simmer instead.
- The cheeseclothNot decorative. A whole poached trout falls apart when lifted, and the cloth is the handle. Leave long tails of cheesecloth outside the pot, or use a fish poacher with a rack.
- The water and the lemonUse enough boiling water to cover the fish by an inch, and season it properly: the original's lemon juice alone is thin. Salt the water, and a bay leaf, peppercorns and a few slices of onion make a court bouillon at no extra trouble.
- Stovetop timingAn hour is a fireless-cooker figure, not a cooking time. Poached at a bare shiver, well under the boil, whole fish needs roughly 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness measured at the shoulder. A 3 lb lake trout is usually done in 25 to 30 minutes.
- Cream sauceThe period default is a medium bechamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little of the poaching liquid. Chopped dill or parsley is a reasonable addition.
- YieldThe original gives none. A whole lake trout of 3 to 4 lb serves four to six as a main course.
Fireless cookery was a genuine domestic-science movement, not a fringe idea: from roughly 1905 into the 1920s American home-economics writers promoted insulated cookers, descended from the European hay box, as a way to save fuel and free the cook from watching a range in a hot kitchen. Recipes were rewritten around the cooker's peculiar economics of heated soapstone discs and long unattended holds. Lake trout was an obvious candidate: the Great Lakes commercial fishery was still enormous in this period, and the fish was said to be cheap and widely shipped inland on ice, a staple rather than the luxury it later became after the fishery collapsed in the mid-twentieth century under overfishing and the sea lamprey. Poaching a whole fish in cloth and serving it under a plain cream sauce is straight out of the same genteel, mildly French-inflected tradition that gave American cookbooks their endless white sauces.