Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Baked Fillets of Whitefish
Baked Fillets of Whitefish
Scale some large whitefish, split them, remove the backbone, season the fillets with salt and pepper, and dip them in beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs, and again in beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs, and again in beaten egg. Put a lump of fresh lard in a baking dish, heat it, and then put in the fillets. Bake the fish in the oven for twenty minutes, until they are lightly colored. When cooked, drain the grease off the fillets, place them on a hot dish, garnish with fried parsley, and serve with potatoes and a sauceboatful of parsley sauce.
Shell-Fish. Clam Fritters Place some fresh clams into one pan, and the liquor from them into another. Prepare a mixture of broken crackers and flour in equal quantities, and dip the clams first into their own liquor and then into this, repeating this operation three times; finally dipping them into milk, and then again into the flour mixture. Have prepared some boiling lard, drop in a few clams at a time, let them fry for about five minutes; then remove them with a skimmer, place them on a strainer, drain away the fat, and they are ready to be served. The pan containing the lard should be so deep that the clams will be covered when put in.
Two recipes have run together on this page: the baked whitefish fillets, and the clam fritters that open the shellfish chapter. Treat them separately.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe simply says to bake for twenty minutes. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, is a reasonable modern reading, and twenty minutes suits fillets of about three quarters of an inch. Cook until the flakes just separate; the usual safe-cooking figure for fish is 145F internal, though many cooks pull whitefish a little short of that.
- The triple coating is the pointRead the sequence carefully: egg, crumbs, egg, crumbs, egg. That final wet layer of egg sets in the hot fat into a thin sealed shell, which is what keeps a lean fish moist through a dry bake. Skipping to a single egg-and-crumb pass gives a different, drier dish.
- Heat the fat firstThe lard must be genuinely hot in the dish before the fillets go in, or the bottom crust absorbs grease instead of frying. Any neutral fat or clarified butter works; lard gives the crispest result. Allow about a quarter cup for four fillets.
- WhitefishGreat Lakes whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis), sold mainly around the lakes and increasingly frozen elsewhere. Any lean, fine-flaked white fish substitutes: walleye or haddock. Ask for the fish scaled, split and pin-boned and you have skipped the first sentence.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into fat at about 350F for ten to fifteen seconds, until they stop hissing and turn deep green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so dry it thoroughly first.
- Parsley sauceOscar assumes the reader knows it: a white sauce or butter sauce finished with a generous quantity of chopped parsley, seasoned and sharpened with lemon. Serve it in a sauceboat as written rather than over the fish, which would soften the crust.
- Clam fritters"Broken crackers" most likely means plain soda or water crackers crushed to coarse crumbs, half and half with flour as the recipe specifies. The clams are shucked raw, dipped repeatedly in their own liquor and the crumb mixture, then milk, then the crumbs again. No fat temperature is given, only "boiling lard"; five minutes is long for a shucked clam by modern practice, and three is closer to the mark unless they are large chowder clams, and even then check one.
- YieldNeither recipe states a quantity. Figure one split whitefish, six to eight ounces of fillet, per person, and a dozen shucked clams per serving of fritters as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, but his 1896 Cook Book collected the hotel's working repertoire, and this fish course shows how it operated: a Great Lakes freshwater fish, brought east by rail and ice in the same decades that made whitefish and lake trout standard on New York menus, dressed in the French-trained manner of the house with fried parsley and a sauceboat. The heavy multiple breading and the bake in hot lard are a hotel-kitchen solution to a lean fish that dries out easily, and the same repeated-dipping logic reappears immediately in the clam fritters that follow. Whitefish was cheap and plentiful then; the Lakes fishery came under pressure in the twentieth century from overfishing and the sea lamprey, whose documented devastation was chiefly of lake trout, while whitefish stocks declined and in several lakes recovered and the fish is still commercially caught.