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Baked Salmon, Trout or Pickerel
Clean thoroughly, wipe carefully, and lay in a dripping-pan with hot water enough to prevent scorching (a perforated tin sheet or rack fitting loosely in the pan, or several muffin-rings may be used to keep the fish from the bottom of the pan, and the fish may be made to form a circle by tying head and tail together); bake slowly, basting often with butter and water. When done have ready a cup of sweet cream into which a few spoons of hot water have been poured, stir in two table-spoons melted butter and a little chopped parsley, and heat in a vessel of boiling water; add the gravy from the dish and boil up once. Place the fish in a hot dish, and pour over the sauce.- Mrs. Theo. Brown, Cape Girardeau, Mo.
A whole baked fish with a warm cream-and-butter sauce finished in a water bath. The method is sound; only the oven language and the fish sizes need translating.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no temperature, and the range it assumed cannot be pinned to a number. A moderate-to-low modern oven, somewhere around 300-325F, is a reasonable stand-in. The pan water and frequent basting are there to keep the flesh from drying, which a slow oven supports.
- Judge by temperature, not clockThe original gives no time at all. Figure roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point and pull the fish at about 135F at the backbone; it will carry a few degrees further while the sauce is finished, and 145F is the usual modern target. Flesh that flakes freely from the bone is generally already slightly overdone.
- Dripping-pan and rackA dripping-pan is simply a shallow roasting pan. Use a wire rack rather than muffin rings, and add water only to a depth of about a quarter inch — enough to steam and prevent scorching, not enough to poach the underside.
- Tying head to tailA presentation trick for a whole fish served at table, and it does help a long thin fish fit a domestic pan. Run kitchen twine through the mouth and around the tail; if the skin is likely to split, skip it and simply curve the fish in the pan.
- Sweet creamUnsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream that was common in nineteenth-century kitchens. Use heavy or whipping cream; modern half-and-half will break more readily in the sauce.
- The hinge: keep the sauce off direct heat"heat in a vessel of boiling water" means a double boiler. Gentle, indirect heat keeps the butter and cream smooth; the single "boil up once" after the pan juices go in is all the direct heat the recipe wants, and prolonged hard boiling risks the butter separating out.
- Pan juices"The gravy from the dish" is the fish liquor and melted basting butter left in the pan. Spoon off the watery layer if it is very dilute, or the sauce will not coat.
- PickerelIn American usage this means the smaller Esox species, chain or redfin pickerel, and loosely small pike; the walleye-as-pickerel name is mainly Canadian. A lean freshwater fish with fine bones. Any firm-fleshed whole fish of 2-4 lb works: trout, char, small salmon, striped bass.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves three to four as a main course. The sauce as written (about a cup of cream plus butter) is generous for that amount and can be halved.
The Dixie Cook Book, like most of the big subscription-sold community cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s, was assembled from contributions credited by name and town — here Mrs. Theo. Brown of Cape Girardeau, a Mississippi River port in southeast Missouri. That geography explains the trio in the title: pickerel and trout came from inland waters, and salmon reached the interior in quantity only after the Columbia River canneries and the refrigerated railcar, so a cook in a river town would substitute freely among whatever whole fish the market offered. The technique is older than the book. Baking a whole fish on a rack above a little water, basted with butter, is a compromise between roasting and poaching that suited coal and wood ranges, where the floor of the oven ran far hotter than the air above it; the rack and the water are both there to keep the underside from scorching. The finishing sauce — cream loosened with hot water, enriched with butter and held over boiling water — is a plain domestic cousin of the French butter sauces, arrived at by cooks who understood from practice that butter and cream will separate if pushed to a hard boil, even if they had no vocabulary for emulsions.