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Baked Bluefish
Clean a four-pound bluefish, stuff, sew, and bake as Baked Halibut with Stuffing, omitting to cut gashes on sides, as the fish is rich enough without addition of pork. Baste often with one-third cup butter melted in two-thirds cup boiling water. Serve with Shrimp Sauce.
A cross-reference recipe: Farmer assumes you have just read Baked Halibut with Stuffing and only tells you what changes. The changes are the point — no salt pork, and constant basting with a butter-and-water mixture.
- Why no porkLean fish were traditionally gashed and larded with strips of salt pork to keep them from drying. Bluefish carries enough of its own oil that added fat makes it heavy, which is exactly why Farmer strikes the step.
- Oven heatThis recipe gives no temperature; it defers to Baked Halibut with Stuffing. Where Farmer calls for a hot oven, that is conventionally read as roughly 400-425F. Start hot to set the skin, and drop the heat if the top colors before the center is done.
- Timing by thickness, not by weightPeriod instructions run to an hour or more for a whole fish. Modern practice measures at the thickest point: roughly 10 minutes per inch, plus extra for the mass of stuffing. For a four-pound stuffed bluefish that is likely to mean something closer to 45 minutes to an hour; go by the thermometer rather than the clock.
- DonenessThe flesh should flake and read 145F at the thickest part of the shoulder; check the stuffing as well, since it sits against raw fish. Bluefish turns dry and cottony quickly past that point.
- The basting liquidOne-third cup butter melted in two-thirds cup boiling water gives a thin, loose liquid that spreads over the fish more easily than butter alone and steams the surface as it evaporates. It will separate, so stir it before each basting; keep it warm and spoon it over every ten minutes or so.
- Sewing the fishA trussing needle and cotton kitchen twine, or a few short skewers laced with twine, closes the cavity. Remove the thread before serving; pull it while the fish is still hot and it comes away cleanly.
- Buying itBluefish is strongly flavored and its oil goes off faster than most, so buy it the day you cook it and look for firm, bright flesh. The dark strip of bloodline along the fillet is the most assertive part and can be trimmed if you find it strong.
- Shrimp SauceIn this book that is a white sauce enriched with butter and cooked shrimp. Farmer does not say why she pairs it with bluefish.
- YieldA four-pound whole fish with stuffing serves six, allowing for head, frame and skin.
Bluefish was a familiar summer fish in New England in Farmer's day, caught in quantity off the Atlantic coast. It appears here as one of a family of near-identical baked-and-stuffed preparations -- halibut, cod, haddock, bluefish, shad -- that Farmer handles by writing one recipe in full and reducing the rest to a note of what differs, a habit of economy that runs through the whole book. The distinction she draws is the old division between lean fish and oily fish: lean fish were larded with salt pork to survive a long oven, while oily fish like bluefish, mackerel and shad needed no such help.