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Baked Haddock with Stuffing
Clean a four-pound haddock, sprinkle with salt inside and out, stuff, and sew. Cut five diagonal gashes on each side of backbone and insert narrow strips of fat salt pork, having gashes on one side come between gashes on other side. Shape with skewers in form of letter S, and fasten skewers with small twine. Place on greased fish-sheet in a dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, brush over with melted butter, dredge with flour, and place around fish small pieces of fat salt pork. Bake one hour in hot oven, basting as soon as fat is tried out, and continue basting every ten minutes. Serve with Drawn Butter, Egg or Hollandaise Sauce. Garnish with lemon and parsley.
Fish Stuffing I ½ cup cracker crumbs = 4 crackers ½ cup stale bread crumbs 1/4 cup melted butter ¼ cup hot water Mix ingredients in order given. ¼ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few drops onion juice
A whole roast fish in the 1896 manner: larded with salt pork, bent into an S with skewers, and basted hard. The technique still works, but the hour in a hot oven belongs to a different fish-cooking era.
- The timing is the hingeA stuffed 4-lb haddock is done when the thickest flesh at the backbone reaches about 140-145F (145F is the standard safe figure, and the stuffing should reach it too), which is likely to be nearer 35-45 minutes at 400F than a full hour. Pull the fish as soon as the flesh parts from the bone.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no numbers; period glosses for a hot oven run roughly 400-450F. Around 425F for the first ten minutes to set the skin and render the pork, then 400F, works well.
- Fish-sheet and dripping-panThe fish-sheet was a perforated tin plate with handles used to lift a whole fish out intact. A sheet pan lined with well-oiled foil, or a doubled sling of parchment under the fish, does the same job.
- Larding with salt porkHaddock is lean, and the strips set into the gashes are there to keep it moist. Thick-cut streaky bacon or unsmoked pancetta substitutes directly; blanch salt pork a minute in boiling water first if it is very salty, since the fish is already salted inside and out.
- "As soon as fat is tried out"Tried out means rendered. Wait until the pork pieces have given up their fat in the pan, then baste with that fat every ten minutes.
- The S shapeBending the fish and pinning it with skewers and twine was a matter of presentation, and it is optional; a straight fish cooks more evenly.
- Stuffing quantitiesThe crumb measures as printed do not add up against a quarter cup of butter and a quarter cup of water for a 4-lb fish. Work to about a cup and a half of mixed cracker and stale bread crumbs total, moistened just enough to hold together loosely, and pack it lightly so steam can move through.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. A teaspoon of very finely minced onion gives the same effect with a little more texture.
- YieldA 4-lb whole haddock feeds four to five as a main course.
Baked stuffed haddock was the New England answer to a cheap, abundant fish: Boston's fish piers landed haddock in quantity year-round, and it was the everyday alternative to more expensive cod. The larding with fat salt pork is a survival of much older practice, when lean fish and lean meat alike were pierced and threaded with pork to supply the fat they lacked, and salt pork was the fat most Massachusetts kitchens had on hand. The S-curve, fixed with skewers and twine, reflects a period taste for fish brought to table whole and arranged, garnished with lemon and parsley, and served with one of the standard white sauces that Fannie Farmer's book teaches as a graduated series -- drawn butter first, then egg sauce, then hollandaise for company.