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Boiled White Fish
Mrs. Andrews.
Lay the fish open; put it in a dripping pan, with the back down; nearly cover with water; to one fish put two tablespoons salt; cover tightly and simmer (not boil) onehalf hour; dress with gravy, butter and pepper; garnish with sliced eggs.
For sauce use a piece of butter the size of an egg, one tablespoon of flour, one-half pint boiling water; boil a few minutes, and add three hard boiled eggs, sliced.
A Great Lakes fish, poached in salted water on the stovetop and finished with a simple butter sauce thickened with flour and studded with egg. The one thing to change is the timing.
- Half an hour is too longWhitefish is done when the flesh turns opaque and separates from the bone — roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at a bare simmer, so 10 to 15 minutes for a typical split fish. Thirty minutes will leave you with cotton wool.
- What "white fish" means hereIn an 1870s Midwestern book this is lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis), sold split and dressed, usually 2 to 4 lb. Lake trout, char, haddock or cod fillets all behave similarly in this treatment.
- The dripping panA dripping pan was the shallow rectangular pan set under roasting meat. Use a roasting pan or a large deep skillet that will hold the fish flat, set over one or two burners.
- Two tablespoons of saltThat is not seasoning but a light poaching brine, meant to firm the flesh and season it through. It is correct for a whole fish in a pan of water; do not scale it up as if it were table salt.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With one tablespoon of flour and a half pint (1 cup) of boiling water you get a thin, loose sauce — closer to a broth-butter than a béchamel. Use two tablespoons of flour if you want it to coat.
- "Dress with gravy"The "gravy" is the sauce described at the end, not a separate preparation. Make it while the fish poaches so the fish can be served hot straight from the pan.
- Simmer, not boilThe original singles this out with a parenthetical "(not boil)" for good reason: a rolling boil will break a split fish apart. Keep the water at a bare shiver.
- YieldA 3 lb whole whitefish would serve about four as a main course, and the sauce quantity given suits roughly that size. The recipe itself states no yield.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from recipes contributed by Chicago housewives and sold for charity, and it shows its geography plainly: lake whitefish was a everyday fine fish of the Great Lakes cities, and cookbooks of the region print it boiled, broiled and planked with a casualness Eastern books reserve for cod. The method here — poaching in salted water and dressing with a flour-thickened butter sauce garnished with hard-boiled egg — is a familiar nineteenth-century "egg sauce" treatment for boiled fish, an English inheritance usually associated with salt cod and boiled fowl, applied to whatever the local water provided. Recipes in this book carry the contributor's name, and Mrs. Andrews' attribution is part of the fundraising cookbook's logic: the credit was the incentive to contribute.