Boiled Fish
To boil a fish, fill with a rich dressing of rolled crackers seasoned with butter, pepper, salt and sage, wrap it in a well-floured cloth, tie closely with twine or sew, and place in well-salted boiling water. Place where it will simmer from eight to ten minutes to the pound, according to size and thickness of fish. -Mrs. Henry C. Farrar, Cleveland, Tenn.
A whole stuffed fish poached in a cloth was standard practice when fish came in whole and the kitchen had no reliable way to move a large one intact. The method still works; the timing is the part to reconsider.
- The timing is the hingeEight to ten minutes per pound is generous for most fish. Modern practice measures by thickness, not weight: roughly 10 minutes per inch at the thickest point, and the fish is done at 140-145F, when the flesh flakes and turns opaque at the backbone. On a 4 lb fish that works out at around 30 minutes rather than the 32-40 the per-pound rule gives.
- Rolled crackersSoda or water crackers crushed with a rolling pin, which is to say plain cracker crumbs. Unsalted saltines are the closest match; count on about 1 cup of crumbs and 2-3 tablespoons of butter for a 3-4 lb fish.
- Simmer, never boilThe recipe puts the fish into boiling water and then moves it somewhere it will only simmer. Hold it at a bare shiver from that point on; a rolling boil breaks the flesh apart inside the cloth and forces the stuffing out.
- The clothA double thickness of cheesecloth or a clean, floured muslin tea towel, wrapped loosely enough that the fish can expand slightly and tied at both ends and in the middle. Leave the twine ends long so the fish can be lifted out without touching it. A fish poacher with a rack does the same job.
- Salt in the waterRoughly 1 tablespoon of salt per quart, noticeably salty though well short of seawater. Poaching water that is not salted enough is generally held to leach flavour from the fish rather than season it.
- Which fishThe recipe names no species and no weight, only 'size and thickness'. The method suits a firm whole round fish; delicate flatfish and very oily fish do not hold up well to stuffing and cloth-wrapping.
- SageSage in a fish stuffing reads oddly now, though sage was a standard stuffing herb in nineteenth-century American cooking. Use it with a light hand, a scant half teaspoon dried, or substitute parsley, thyme and lemon zest.
- Yield and servingA 4 lb whole fish will serve about four. Unwrap on a warm platter, slide the cloth away, and serve with drawn butter, an egg sauce or a caper sauce, all of them common accompaniments to boiled fish in period cookbooks.
Boiling a whole fish in a floured cloth was one of the standard nineteenth-century solutions to a genuine mechanical problem: how to cook a large fish through and still get it to the table in one piece. The cloth held the body and the stuffing together and gave the cook something to lift by; the flour on the cloth helped keep the skin from sticking to the weave. Recipes like this one appear across American and British household books of the period, usually with a per-pound timing, the conventional idiom of the era. The Dixie Cook Book, a commercial compilation that carried named contributions, credits its contributors by name and town -- here Mrs. Henry C. Farrar of Cleveland, Tennessee -- which is part of why such books are useful evidence of what was actually being cooked in ordinary Southern kitchens rather than what a professional thought ought to be.