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Boiled Fish
Place the fish in a square of cheesecloth and tie the four corners together. Have the pail of the cooker half full of boiling water and lower the fish into it, adding the juice of a half lemon and a teaspoon of salt. Boil for ten minutes and then remove to the fireless cooker for two or three hours according to the size of the piece of fish to be boiled. Drain thoroughly, remove the cloth and serve on a large platter, covering the fish with drawn butter and finely chopped parsley, and garnishing the platter with slices of lemon.
A fireless-cooker recipe, which means the long hold in the insulated box is doing the work an oven or stove would otherwise do. On a modern range the same dish is a fifteen-minute poach.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box, packed with felt, hay or mineral wool, holding a metal pail. Food was brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in the box to finish in falling heat with no further fuel. A heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels approximates it, but there is no reason to imitate it here.
- The hold is the part to skipTwo or three hours in cooling water will reduce a piece of fish to shreds and wash out its flavour. Fish is done at 130-140F at the thickest point, roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at a bare simmer.
- Do not actually boilDespite the wording, a rolling boil tears the flesh apart and toughens the muscle fibres. Bring the water to a boil, then drop it to a lazy simmer with barely a tremble before the fish goes in.
- The cheesecloth is worth keepingWrapping and tying gives you something to lift by, which is the difference between a whole piece of fish on the platter and a broken one. Cotton butter muslin or a clean tea towel does the same job.
- Drawn butterIn American cookbooks of this period, usually not simply melted butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce. Proportions varied from book to book: something like 1/4 cup butter worked with 1 to 3 tablespoons flour, whisked into a cup of hot water or fish liquor and simmered until it thickens, with more butter beaten in off the heat.
- Seasoning the waterHalf a lemon and a teaspoon of salt in several quarts of water is very light seasoning by current standards. A proper court-bouillon adds a bay leaf, peppercorns, an onion and a splash of vinegar or white wine.
- YieldNo size is given for the fish. A 2 to 3 lb piece of cod, haddock or salmon serves four to six and is what a "large platter" presentation implies.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, during the vogue for the fireless cooker, an insulated box that let a cook bring food to a boil and then walk away from the stove for the afternoon. The appeal was fuel economy and freedom from a coal range in a hot kitchen. Boiled fish under drawn butter with lemon and parsley was already a standard of Anglo-American cookery well before that; the interest here is watching a delicate ingredient pressed into a method better suited to tough cuts and dried beans, which is why the two-to-three-hour hold reads so oddly to a modern cook.