Home › Fireless Cookery › Boiled White Fish
Boiled White Fish
Clean and bone the fish and sew in a cheesecloth bag, leaving room for the fish to swell. Place in kettle with back down; cover with boiling salted water, allowing one tablespoon of salt and vinegar or lemon juice to each quart of water. Boil for five minutes. Place in cooker for one hour. If fish weighs over two pounds, boil ten minutes before placing in cooker. The skin may be easily peeled from a boiled fish. Serve with tomato sauce.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the fish is brought to the boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box to finish in its own retained heat. Everything hinges on the water still being at a rolling boil when it goes into the cooker.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or asbestos, into which a boiling pot was sealed to coast down slowly. A heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler will approximate it; a low-set slow cooker comes closer in practice, though neither reproduces the fireless cooker's steady fall from boiling.
- Load it boilingThe pot must go into the cooker at a full boil and be sealed immediately. Retained-heat cooking is only safe when the water starts hot enough that it stays well above 140F for the whole hour. A pot that has cooled on the counter, or a poorly insulated box, leaves fish sitting in the danger zone.
- Check the temperatureBefore serving, take the fish to 145F at the thickest part. An hour in a hot bath will normally overshoot that comfortably, but the original gives no way of knowing, and a whole fish of three or four pounds is a slow conductor.
- "White fish"Not whitefish the Great Lakes species, though that would suit. It means any lean, pale-fleshed fish: cod, haddock, halibut, pike, hake. Oily fish such as salmon or mackerel behave differently and are not what is meant here.
- The cheesecloth bagA common way of handling a whole fish for poaching, so it can be lifted without breaking. Leave room for the fish to swell, as instructed, so the flesh does not split, and long tails of cloth at each end make useful handles. Two layers of cheesecloth or a length of muslin works.
- Salt and acidRead as one tablespoon of salt and one of vinegar or lemon juice per quart, though the original wording is ambiguous and may intend a tablespoon in total. The acid firms the surface protein and helps keep the flesh pale; it is not there for flavor and should not taste sour in the finished dish.
- Back downThe recipe specifies laying the fish back down rather than on its side; presumably so a boned fish does not fall open along the belly and loses shape less when lifted.
- Yield and servingA three-pound cleaned fish will serve about four. Peel the skin while the fish is still warm, when it slips off in sheets; cold, it clings. The tomato sauce intended is presumably the plain flour-thickened kind usual in cookbooks of the period.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between about 1905 and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the era gave it its own section. The appeal was fuel: a wood or coal range was expensive and brutally hot to tend in summer, so bringing food to the boil for five minutes and then sealing it in an insulated chest to finish did an hour's work for five minutes' fire. Home-economics extension bulletins promoted the "hay box" as thrift and as a way to let a housewife leave the kitchen, and commercial cookers were sold as insulated cabinets with soapstone discs heated on the stove. Boiled white fish with tomato sauce was already a plain, thoroughly conventional dinner by then, which is precisely why it appears here: the point of the entry is the method, not the dish. Its decline is usually attributed to electric ranges and thermostatic ovens, and it survives mainly in the modern slow cooker and in the insulated cool-box cookery still taught for camping.