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Ways of Cooking Fish
To Cook Fish in Boiling Water. Small cod, haddock, or cusk are cooked whole in enough boiling water to cover, to which is added salt and lemon juice or vinegar. Salt gives flavor; lemon juice or vinegar keeps the flesh white. A long fish-kettle containing a rack on which to place fish is useful but rather expensive. In place of fish-kettle, if the fish is not too large to be coiled in it, a frying-basket may be used placed in any kettle.
Large fish are cut in thick pieces for boiling, containing the number of pounds required. Examples: salmon and halibut.
Pieces cut from large fish for boiling should be cleaned and tied in a piece of cheesecloth to prevent scum being deposited on the fish. If skin is not removed before serving, scald the dark skin and scrape to remove coloring; this may be easily accomplished by holding fish on two forks, and lowering into boiling water the part covered with black skin; then remove and scrape. Time required for boiling fish depends on extent of surface exposed to water. Con- BOILED MACKEREL, GARNISHED WITH POTATO BALLS, CUCUMBER RIBBONS, SLICES OF LEMON CUT IN FANCY SHAPES, AND PARSLEY. Page 161.
HOLLENDEN HALIBUT. - Page 167.
STUFFED HADDOCK READY FOR BAKING. - Page 164.
SMELTS PREPARED FOR COOKING. - Page 173.
This is a method rather than a dish, and the text breaks off mid-sentence just as it reaches the timing. A few notes on translating the technique to a modern range.
- Do not actually boilA rolling boil tears the flesh apart and squeezes out moisture. Bring the water to a boil, slide the fish in, then drop the heat so the surface barely shivers at around 165-175F and hold it there.
- The missing timingThe page breaks off before the rule, and what it said cannot be recovered from the fragment; the text only tells us that time depends on the extent of surface exposed to the water. A workable modern guide is roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point. Cook until the flesh separates but still looks moist rather than chalky; food-safety guidance puts fish at 145F internal, while cooks aiming for a softer result stop lower.
- Salt and acidSeason the water assertively, about a tablespoon of salt per quart, plus a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar. The acid firms the surface proteins and keeps white-fleshed fish looking white rather than grey.
- Substitutes for the fish kettleA long fish kettle is still expensive and still unnecessary. A roasting pan across two burners works for a whole fish; the frying-basket trick the book suggests is sound, and a wide deep skillet handles cut steaks well.
- The cheesecloth wrapWrapping a cut piece of salmon or halibut in cheesecloth, with the ends left long, does two jobs: it keeps coagulated protein scum off the surface and gives you handles to lift the piece out intact. Cotton butcher's twine or a wide strip of muslin does the same.
- CuskA cod-family fish once common on New England markets and now rarely sold, partly because stocks are depleted. Haddock, pollock or hake behave the same way in poaching liquid.
- Those trailing linesThe run of capitals at the end is not part of the method. They are the captions to the book's photographic plates, complete with their own page references, swept up by the scan.
- YieldFigure about a pound of whole fish, or six ounces of cut steak, per person. Poached fish is nearly always served with a sauce, which the book handles separately.
Boiled fish was the plainest and most respectable thing a nineteenth-century Boston kitchen could put on a table, and this sort of cookery treated it as foundational technique before any sauce or garnish was allowed near it. The species named here, cod, haddock, cusk, halibut, are the working catch of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, and sold cheap; the long fish kettle dismissed here as expensive was a substantial piece of equipment. The instruction to scald and scrape the dark skin is a reminder of how much of this cookery was about appearance: whiteness, one might argue, signalled freshness and gentility, which may also be why the lemon juice goes in. The accompanying plates, whose captions have bled into this page, show the finished ideal, a mackerel ringed with potato balls, cucumber ribbons and lemon cut in fancy shapes, the sort of garnishing that turned a boiled fish into a dinner course.