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Boiled White Fish
Dress the fish nicely, and cover in fish-kettle with boiling water seasoned well with salt; remove the scum as it rises, and simmer, allowing from eight to ten minutes time to every pound; when about half done, add a little vinegar or lemon juice, take out, drain, and dish carefully, pouring over it drawn butter; or garnish with sprigs of parsley, and serve with egg-sauce. - Mrs. M. Smith, Pittsburgh.
A plain nineteenth-century poaching method that still works, provided you ignore the cooking time. Everything else here is sound: heavily salted water, skimmed, kept below a rolling boil.
- The timing is the problemEight to ten minutes per pound is generous for a whole fish and will overshoot. Judge by thickness instead: about 8 to 10 minutes per inch at a bare simmer, or until the flesh at the backbone reaches 145F and parts from the bone.
- "Dress the fish nicely"Scale, gut, trim the fins and gills, and leave the head and tail on for the sake of the platter. The fish goes in whole, which is why the vessel matters.
- Fish-kettleA long, narrow, lidded pan with a perforated lifting rack. Without one, wrap the fish in a double layer of cheesecloth with the ends left long as handles and use a roasting pan on the stovetop; whole fish falls apart when lifted with a spatula.
- Season the water hardThe salt is not a garnish. Figure roughly 1 tablespoon of salt per quart of water; it seasons the flesh and firms it as it sets.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil bursts the skin and shreds the flakes. Hold the water at a lazy shiver, around 180F, with the surface barely moving.
- The vinegar or lemon juiceAdded halfway through, the acid tightens the surface protein and keeps the flesh white rather than dulled. A tablespoon or two of either is enough for a kettle of water; more will begin to taste of it.
- Drawn butter and egg-sauceDrawn butter in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is generally not clarified butter but a simple flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a thin bechamel made with the fish liquor or water. Egg-sauce is usually the same sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred through.
- Which fishThe intended fish is Great Lakes whitefish, mild and fairly fatty. Cod, haddock, striped bass or a whole trout of similar size behave the same way in the kettle.
- YieldA whole fish of 3 to 4 lb dressed serves four to six as a main course.
Boiled whitefish was a staple of American hotel and steamboat dining in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Great Lakes whitefish and lake trout were shipped by rail in ice to inland cities in enormous quantity. The Dixie Cook-Book was assembled from signed contributions of this kind. The method itself is older than the railroads. Poaching whole fish in salted water and serving it with a flour-thickened butter sauce, or that sauce enriched with chopped egg, comes straight out of English cookery, where boiled fish with egg sauce had been standard since at least the eighteenth century. The instruction to add acid partway through is a practical trick of the same tradition, generally explained at the time as keeping the flesh white and firm.