Stewed Fish
Cut a fish across in slices an inch and a half thick, and sprinkle with salt; boil two sliced onions until done, pour off water, season with pepper, add two tea-cups hot water and a little parsley, and in this simmer the fish until thoroughly done. Serve hot. Good method for any fresh-water fish.
A plain fish braise that depends on two things the original leaves unsaid: how thick the fish steaks really are, and how briefly they should sit in the liquid.
- What fish to useSteaks cut an inch and a half thick across the body point to a large fresh-water fish — carp, catfish, pike, drum or a big bass. Farmed catfish or trout steaks work; fillets will fall apart at that thickness and are better folded and reduced to eight minutes of cooking.
- Two tea-cupsNineteenth-century tea-cup measures are inconsistent; depending on the source a tea-cupful is reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz. Taking it at roughly 6 fl oz gives about 1½ cups in total. In a snug pan that will not cover the steaks, which suits the method: this is closer to a braise than a poach.
- The hinge: do not boil"Simmer until thoroughly done" is the one instruction to read narrowly. Fish protein sets at around 140F; a bare shiver in the pan for 8-12 minutes for inch-and-a-half steaks is enough. A rolling boil will shred the flesh into the onion liquor.
- Boiling and draining the onionsParboiling the onions and pouring off the water takes off their raw sulphur bite. Sweating them in butter for ten minutes gives a rounder result if you would rather not lose the liquid.
- Salting aheadSprinkling the slices with salt and leaving them while the onions cook is a short dry brine. Twenty to thirty minutes firms the flesh; much longer and the steaks turn dense and ham-like.
- SeasoningPepper and parsley are the whole seasoning here. A bay leaf, a strip of lemon peel, or a spoonful of the salt pork fat that a Southern kitchen would have had at hand are all period-plausible additions.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of fish; a 2-3 lb fish cut this way would serve about four. Spoon the onions and pan liquor over the fish; there is not enough of it to want thickening.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) was one of the large compendium volumes assembled for Southern households in the decades after the Civil War — though much of its content was adapted from earlier Northern compilations rather than written fresh for the region, so a given recipe is not always Southern in origin. Fresh-water fish — catfish, carp, buffalo, drum, pike — are generally softer-fleshed than most salt-water fish, and onion, pepper and parsley are the usual seasonings for them in nineteenth-century American books. The method itself, thick cross-cut steaks stewed in a little seasoned liquid, is older than the book and common throughout English and American cookery of the period; it suited a kitchen where an unfilleted fish arrived whole and had to be portioned with a heavy knife across the backbone.