Baked Bluefish
Stuff, and bake as directed. Serve with cream gravy given under recipe for Boiled Bass.
This fish need not be larded as it is sufficiently rich itself.
This is a cross-reference entry: the Butterick book assumes you have already read the general directions for stuffing and baking a fish, and gives you only what is different about bluefish. Here is what the surrounding pages take for granted.
- What the recipe is missing"Bake as directed" points back to the book's basic baked-fish method: a whole fish, cleaned and scaled, cavity filled with a bread stuffing and closed up before baking. The "cream gravy" is a milk-based sauce given under the book's Boiled Bass entry; the excerpt does not indicate where in the book that entry falls.
- Oven temperatureThe excerpt gives no oven heat at all, and the book's general baked-fish directions are not quoted here. As a rough guide, a whole stuffed bluefish of 3-4 lb will take something like 35-45 minutes in a fairly brisk oven.
- DonenessCook to 145F at the thickest part, or until the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone. Stuffing inside a fish should reach the same temperature, which is why a very large fish is better baked with the stuffing alongside than packed in.
- Why no lardingLarding means threading strips of salt pork or bacon fat through lean flesh with a needle, and was sometimes done for lean fish such as cod, haddock and pike. Bluefish carries roughly 4-6 percent fat in the flesh, so it bastes itself. A little butter or oil brushed on the skin is enough.
- Buying bluefishThe same oil that makes larding unnecessary turns rancid fast. Bluefish should smell of clean sea water and nothing else; if it smells strong or fishy at the counter it is already past its best. Cook it the day you buy it.
- The stuffingA plain 1900s fish stuffing is stale bread crumbs, melted butter, chopped onion or parsley, salt, pepper and enough milk or beaten egg to bind. Keep it loose rather than packed, or the cavity heats unevenly.
- YieldWhole fish is usually reckoned at about a pound of uncleaned fish per person, so a 4 lb bluefish feeds roughly four, perhaps a little more with the gravy and a starch.
Bluefish was a cheap, abundant Atlantic fish in the period the Butterick book was written, running in enormous schools off the eastern seaboard from spring into autumn and reaching city markets in quantity. The entry it receives is only three sentences long. The instruction that it need not be larded is the useful part, and it marks a real division in American fish cookery of the time between the lean white fish, which were routinely threaded with salt pork to keep them from drying, and the oily fish, which were not. The Butterick Publishing Company was a dress-pattern firm, and its cook book belongs to a wave of household manuals issued by companies whose main business lay elsewhere but whose customer lists were made up of women running kitchens.