Baked Bass
Make filling of cracker or bread crumbs, an egg, pepper, cloves, salt and butter substitute. Fill very full, when sewed up, grate over it a small nutmeg, and sprinkle it with pounded cracker. FISH AND CEREAL OMELET Then pour on the white of one egg, and a little melted butter substitute. Bake it an hour in the same dish in which it is to be served.
A whole stuffed bass, written for a cook who already knew how to clean and truss a fish. The text is fragmentary — the line "FISH AND CEREAL OMELET" is a stray heading from the neighboring recipe that drifted into this one, and should be ignored.
- The hinge: cooking timeAn hour will dry out any bass under about 5 lb. Judge by thickness instead — roughly 10 minutes per inch measured at the thickest part in a 350F oven, until the flesh at the backbone reads 145F. A 4 lb stuffed fish lands nearer 45 minutes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a sensible modern default. The dish is meant to go from oven to table, so use something presentable and shallow enough that the fish is not steaming in its own liquid.
- Butter substituteThe phrase points to thrift or wartime shortage, and would have meant margarine, oleomargarine, or a vegetable shortening. Butter works well here and will give the stuffing more flavor.
- Pounded crackerSoda or common crackers crushed fine — the closest modern stand-in is unsalted saltines or plain cracker meal. For the stuffing, count on about 2 cups of crumbs, 1 egg, 4 tablespoons butter, and enough of the seasoning to taste before it goes in the fish.
- Cloves and nutmegGround cloves are aggressive; an eighth of a teaspoon is ample for a whole fish. "A small nutmeg" grated whole over the outside is far more than a modern palate expects — a quarter teaspoon of freshly grated is closer to the mark.
- Sewing upA trussing needle and cotton twine still work best, but three or four wooden skewers laced with twine are easier to remove at table. "Fill very full" is optimistic: crumb stuffing swells, so pack it snugly rather than tightly.
- The egg-white glazeThe white is poured over with a little melted butter; it sets into a thin crust that helps hold the cracker coating in place. It goes on before the fish is baked, not partway through.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb bass with this stuffing serves four to six. Serve directly from the baking dish, as directed, since a whole baked fish rarely survives being moved.
Whole baked stuffed fish was a standing feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks, where a bass, shad, or bluefish was treated much like a small roast: filled with a bread or cracker dressing, sewn shut, and sent to the table entire. The cracker-crumb stuffing is characteristically Northeastern — common crackers and soda crackers were pantry staples long before dried breadcrumbs were sold, and cloves and nutmeg in a savory fish dressing are often said to carry over from an older English tradition of spicing fish heavily. The repeated "butter substitute" is the most telling detail here, pointing to a household economizing on butter.