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Boiled Black Bass
Cook this fish whole, allowing twelve minutes to each pound. Boil in the water with it, one onion, eight peppers, and a blade of mace. Make a cream gravy by blending one tablespoon each of flour and butter, adding one cup of the water in which the bass was boiled. Season with salt, pepper, and celery salt and add one gill of cream in which a pinch of soda has been dissolved. Bring to the boiling point and serve.
A plain poached fish with a quick velouté-style cream sauce. The one thing to change is the cooking time — twelve minutes to the pound will overcook anything but a very large fish.
- Time and temperatureJudge by thickness, not weight: about 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, in water held at a bare tremble (160–180F), not a rolling boil. The fish is done when the flesh at the backbone turns opaque and pulls cleanly from the bone.
- "Boil" means poachA hard boil tears the skin and shreds the flesh of a lean freshwater fish. Bring the seasoned water up, slide the fish in, and keep it just below a simmer.
- A gillHalf a cup. One gill of cream into a cup of stock thickened with a tablespoon each of flour and butter gives a light pouring sauce, not a thick one.
- Eight peppersEight whole peppercorns. A blade of mace is one curl of the dried aril around the nutmeg — if you cannot get blades, substitute ground mace sparingly (equivalents vary, somewhere between a pinch and half a teaspoon), added at the end rather than boiled.
- The pinch of sodaThis is insurance against the cream curdling in slightly acidic fish stock. It works, but a scant pinch is the whole of it; more will give the sauce a soapy, flat taste. Adding the cream off the heat and warming gently does the same job.
- Sourcing the fish"Black bass" here means the freshwater largemouth or smallmouth, a game fish that is not sold commercially in most places. Whole black sea bass, striped bass, walleye or a pair of rainbow trout poach the same way.
- Handling a whole fishWrap it in cheesecloth or lay it on a rack before lowering it into the pan, or it will not come out intact. Save the poaching liquid before you lift the fish — it is the base of the sauce.
- YieldA 3 lb fish serves four, allowing about three-quarters of a pound whole weight per person. The sauce as written is roughly a cup and a half, enough for that.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine house whose Delineator shaped middle-class American housekeeping, and its fish chapter reflects a period when boiled fish under a white or cream sauce was the standard genteel treatment — plainer than the French preparations in hotel cookery, but relying on the same court-bouillon idea of aromatics in the water. Black bass, the smallmouth and largemouth of American lakes and rivers, was prized as a table fish through the nineteenth century and appears often in period cookbooks; because it was taken by anglers rather than sold in quantity, recipes assume a whole fish arriving in the kitchen with the head on. The pinch of soda in the cream is a small piece of household chemistry that turns up repeatedly in books of this era, a guard against the acidity that would curdle a sauce.