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Stuffing for Baked Fish
1 cup broken bread 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 tablespoon minced onion 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1 egg Soak the bread and press out the water; brown the onion in the butter; add it with the seasoning to the crumbs; then add the egg.
A plain bread panade stuffing, enough for one whole fish. The measurements are all standard except one, and the texture depends entirely on how hard you press the bread.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is about an eighth of a teaspoon — a pinch of pepper. The salt at a quarter teaspoon is modest for a cup of bread; taste the mixture before it goes in the fish.
- Broken breadThis means stale bread torn into rough pieces, not dried crumbs from a canister. Day-old white bread with the crust left on works; commercial fine crumbs will absorb water and turn to paste.
- Pressing out the waterThis is the hinge. Squeeze the soaked bread firmly in your hands until it stops dripping but still holds together — too wet and the stuffing steams into a pudding, too dry and it will not bind. Cold water, and only a minute or two of soaking.
- Browning the onionA tablespoon of minced onion in two tablespoons of butter browns in three or four minutes over medium heat. Scrape all the butter into the bread; it is the only fat in the mixture.
- YieldAbout a cup of stuffing, enough for a 2 to 3 lb whole fish. Double it for a large salmon or a pair of small fish.
- Cooking throughStuffing inside a fish heats more slowly than the flesh around it. The fish is done at 145F, but the egg-bound stuffing at the centre should reach 165F, so a stuffed fish needs a few minutes longer than an unstuffed one — pack it loosely rather than tight.
Stuffings built on soaked and wrung-out bread rather than dry crumbs are an old European habit, the same panade that binds a quenelle or a meatball, and they appear for fish in American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The recipe gives no fish weight, leaving the cook to judge how much her fish would hold.