Baked Whitefish
Wash carefully, dry, and stuff with bread crumbs well seasoned; sew up with twine and put in a pan, with enough water to keep from scorching; baste frequently with butter and water, and serve with egg sauce.
HADDOCK SOUFFLÉ-One cup of cold baked haddock and one of mashed potatoes mixed together, one-half cup of milk, add, gradually, salt and pepper; stir in one egg, well beaten; put in a buttered mold or dish and set in the oven until hot; then beat the white of another egg stiff and stir into it the yolk beaten with salt and pepper; heap over the fish and brown.
HALIBUT (à la Créole) - Four pounds of fish; one cup of water; one pint of stewed tomatoes; one slice of onion; three cloves; two tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper. Put the tomatoes, water, cloves and onion on the stove in a stewpan to boil. Mix the butter and flour together, stir them into the sauce when it boils, and add the salt and pepper. Cook ten minutes, and strain into a bowl. Pour into a deep plate boiling water to the depth of one-half an inch, and lay the fish in it for one minute, skin side down; on removing the fish from the water the black skin can be easily taken off. Wash the fish in cold water, season with salt and pepper and lay it on the baking sheet in a dripping-pan; then pour half the tomato sauce around the fish, and bake in a hot oven forty-five minutes, basting three times with the remainder of the tomato sauce. Serve with the sauce remaining in the bottom of the pan poured around the dish.
Three fish dishes run together in one paragraph, in the compressed style of turn-of-the-century cookbooks. The instructions assume you already know how long fish takes; modern practice is far shorter than what the halibut recipe specifies.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockForty-five minutes in a hot oven will dry out a four-pound halibut cut. Fish is done at 145F, or when the flesh just parts at the thickest point — roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at 400-425F. The same applies to the stuffed whitefish, which the recipe never times at all.
- Oven temperatures"Hot oven" in cookbooks of this period generally meant somewhere around 400-450F; the book gives no figures here. The whitefish is given no temperature at all; 375-400F suits a stuffed whole fish, which needs the interior of the stuffing to reach 165F.
- WhitefishIn an American cookbook of this date this most likely means Great Lakes whitefish, generally sold whole and dressed at a few pounds. Any whole round fish of that size — trout, bass, small salmon — behaves much the same way in the pan.
- Sewing and trussingKitchen twine and a trussing needle still work, but a few loops around the body or two or three wooden skewers laced with twine will hold a bread stuffing just as well and come off more easily at the table.
- Egg sauceNot custard: a plain white sauce (butter, flour, milk) with coarsely chopped hard-boiled egg folded in, seasoned with salt and a little cayenne or lemon. It was the standard accompaniment to boiled and baked white fish.
- The haddock "soufflé"It is a fish-and-potato pudding with a meringue-style topping, not a risen soufflé. Bake it at 350F until heated through, then add the beaten white-and-yolk topping and return it to the oven or run it under a broiler only until browned — a few minutes at most.
- Skinning the halibutThe half-inch of boiling water in a deep plate is a scald, not a cook. One minute is enough to loosen the black skin; longer and you begin to cook the surface. A very sharp knife does the same job on a cold fillet if you would rather skip it.
- Straining the Créole sauceThe cloves and onion slice go in whole and come out in the strainer, so do not chop them. Whole cloves left in the finished sauce are unpleasant to bite into.
- YieldsThe whitefish serves 4-6 depending on size. The halibut, at four pounds, serves 6-8. The haddock dish, built on one cup of cooked fish, is a supper dish for 2-3.
Butterick published this book as an extension of its pattern and magazine business, aimed at the same middle-class household that bought its dress patterns — hence the dense, economical layout that packs three recipes into a single block of type. All three dishes reflect the American fish cookery of the period: whitefish from the Great Lakes shipped inland on ice, haddock and halibut off the New England banks, and a leftover-fish dish placed immediately after the baked one. The "à la Créole" label, attached here to a tomato-and-clove sauce, was often applied loosely in northern cookbooks of the era to tomato-based sauces with onion and spice.