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Baked Black Bass
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
Eight good sized onions chopped fine; half that quantity of bread crumbs; butter size of hen's egg; plenty of pepper and salt, mix thoroughly with anchovy sauce until quite red. Stuff your fish with this compound and pour the rest over it, previously sprinkling it with a little red pepper. Shad, pickerel and trout are good the same way. Tomatoes can be used instead of anchovies, and are more economical. If using them take pork in place of butter and chop fine.
A stuffing recipe more than a fish recipe: the original assumes you know how to bake a whole fish and only tells you what goes inside it. A few gaps need filling.
- Cook the onions firstEight finely chopped onions packed raw into a fish cavity will still be sharp and crunchy when the fish is done, since the flesh cooks in well under half an hour. Sweat them in the butter until soft and sweet, then mix in the crumbs and sauce off the heat.
- Butter size of a hen's eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century recipes measure butter this way constantly; a walnut and a hazelnut are the smaller gradations, usually reckoned at roughly a tablespoon and a teaspoon, though the equivalents vary from source to source.
- Scale the quantity downEight large onions and four onions' worth of crumbs is enough stuffing for a fish of six or eight pounds. For a 2-3 lb fish use two or three onions and a cup of crumbs, and reserve the surplus to spoon over the top as the recipe directs.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at around 375F, allowing roughly 12-15 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point (the familiar 10-minutes-per-inch rule assumes a hotter oven, 425-450F); the flesh should just part from the backbone. A stuffed fish will take longer than an unstuffed one.
- Anchovy sauceThis means the bottled Victorian condiment, thin, brown-red and heavily salted, not modern anchovy paste. Anchovy paste loosened with a little water or Worcestershire gives the same effect. "Until quite red" is the visual cue, but taste before salting further, as the sauce is already salt.
- Red pepperCayenne. "Plenty of pepper" plus a sprinkle of cayenne is a genuinely warm dish by period standards, and the anchovy pushes it further; season the stuffing to taste rather than by the letter.
- The tomato variantChopped fresh tomatoes carry much more water than bottled sauce, so drain them or cook them down before mixing, or the stuffing will be soup. The recipe says only 'pork' in place of butter; salt pork is the likeliest reading, and it wants to be rendered a little first.
- The fish itselfBlack bass is a freshwater fish, smallmouth or largemouth, and in most of North America it is now a game fish that cannot be bought. Any firm whole fish of 2-4 lb takes this treatment; the recipe's own list of shad, pickerel and trout tells you the method is indifferent to species.
- YieldA whole fish of 3 lb with this stuffing serves four.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the first great wave of North American charity cookbooks, compiled from contributed receipts by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" after the model of an earlier Chicago volume sold for a home for the friendless; that is why many entries, this one included, carry a contributor's name rather than an author's voice. Black bass was a household fish then in a way it is not now, and the stuffing here is pure mid-Victorian: bottled anchovy sauce, a fashionable English condiment, used to redden and sharpen a plain freshwater fish that can taste muddy. Mrs. Ayer's closing note that tomatoes are "more economical" than anchovies is a small piece of period economics, and it is often said that imported bottled sauce cost real money while tomatoes, by the 1870s, were abundant and often home-grown or home-canned.