Boiled Fish
Wipe the fish carefully and if fresh, sprinkle thoroughly with salt. Wrap it in a piece of cheesecloth to hold the fish together and to prevent the scum from clinging to the fish, and place it in a kettle of boiling water, adding a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of vinegar to every two quarts of water, also a slice of onion, a bay leaf and a sprig of parsley. Cook slowly, following the time table in the front of the book; lift and drain carefully; open the cloth and turn the fish upon the serving platter, garnishing with parsley and slices of lemon. The fish is done when the flesh is firm and separates easily from the bone.
As fish used for boiling has little fat and is cooked in none, it needs a rich sauce to make it palatable. Drawn butter, egg, Hollandaise and Béchamel sauces are used.
A method rather than a fixed recipe, and the technique holds up well once you ignore the word "boiled." What matters is the water temperature and the wrapping.
- Never actually boil it"Cook slowly" is the hinge. Bring the court bouillon to a boil, add the fish, then drop the heat so the surface barely shivers at around 175-180F. A rolling boil tears the flesh apart and pushes albumin out as white curd.
- The cheeseclothStill the best way to move a whole fish without breaking it. Wrap loosely, leave long ends as handles, and tie them to the pot handles so the fish can be lifted straight out. A wide strip of doubled cheesecloth or a length of clean muslin works; so does a fish poacher with a perforated rack.
- The book's time tableYou are unlikely to have the referenced table. Reckon roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point for a whole fish in barely-simmering liquid, and rely on the test the recipe gives: flesh opaque and firm, separating cleanly from the bone. Cooks who use a thermometer often pull fish at about 140F at the spine, though the official recommended safe temperature for fish is 145F.
- Proportions for the liquidA teaspoon of salt to two quarts is a light hand by current standards; many modern poaching liquids are salted more heavily, which seasons the flesh and slows the leaching of flavour into the water. The tablespoon of vinegar per two quarts firms the surface and brightens the flavour.
- "If fresh, sprinkle thoroughly with salt"A salting before poaching, which firms the flesh; the recipe gives no standing time and does not say to rinse. The qualifier "if fresh" presumably distinguishes it from salt cod and other cured fish, which arrive already salted and need soaking instead.
- Which fishLean, firm-fleshed whole fish suit this best: cod, haddock, striped bass, halibut, turbot. Oily fish like mackerel or bluefish are usually better broiled or baked, which is why the recipe notes the lack of fat and calls for sauce.
- The sauces namedDrawn butter is a butter-and-flour white sauce, usually made with hot water (or sometimes the cooking liquid), not the clarified butter the term means today. Egg sauce is that same base with chopped hard-cooked egg stirred in. Hollandaise and Bechamel need no translation.
- YieldA whole 3-4 lb fish handled this way serves four to six, depending on how much goes to head, bones and skin.
Poaching whole fish in an acidulated, aromatic liquid is an old European technique, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly treated it as the standard handling for a fish brought to the table entire. The insistence on cheesecloth and careful lifting reflects a period when a whole fish on a platter, head on and garnished with lemon and parsley, was a set piece of the dinner table rather than a novelty. The concluding note on sauces is the practical heart of the entry: a lean fish poached in water gains nothing rich from its cooking, so the sauce carried the dish, and the four named ones amount to a short course in the white-sauce family that ran through domestic-science cooking of the era.