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Fish Stuffing II
1 cup cracker crumbs ¼ cup melted butter ¼ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon pepper.
Few drops onion juice
This is a stuffing formula in the terse style of the original: ingredients only, no method. The numbers have suffered in transcription, and the proportions are worth reading before you commit.
- The fractionsThe butter, salt, and pepper quantities were checked against the printed page and read as our text now gives them: a quarter cup of melted butter, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of pepper.
- Cracker crumbsThe book means plain common crackers or soda crackers, rolled fine, not sweet crackers and not graham. Unsalted saltines crushed to coarse sand are the closest match; reduce the added salt if your crackers are salted.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. It gives flavour without pieces that would scorch inside the fish. A few drops is literal — no more than about 1/8 teaspoon.
- Method, since none is givenMelt the butter, stir it through the crumbs with the seasonings and onion juice, and stop there. Do not knead it into a paste; the stuffing should stay loose so steam can move through it.
- It is a dry mixtureA cup of crumbs with a quarter cup of butter will not bind. If you want it to hold together, a tablespoon or two of hot water, fish stock or a beaten egg will do it.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for a 3 to 4 lb whole fish or a pair of split fillets. Fill the cavity loosely and close it with small skewers or a few stitches of kitchen twine.
- DonenessJudge the fish, not the stuffing: 145F at the thickest part, or flesh that just parts from the bone. Crumb stuffing in a fish cooks in the time the fish takes and needs no separate allowance.
Fannie Farmer's book gives more than one fish stuffing, and this is a plain one — crumbs, butter, seasoning, a whisper of onion. Cracker crumbs rather than bread are often said to have been the New England default for fish: common crackers were a pantry staple in coastal households, they absorbed butter without turning to mush, and they carried none of the yeasty sweetness of a bread crumb. The Boston Cooking-School style is on display in the entry itself, a bare list with level measurements and no prose. Farmer is generally credited with popularising exact quantities and level measurement in American cooking, and it is why an ingredient list this short was thought to be instruction enough.