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Baked Weakfish with Bacon
Scale, trim fins and cut head off a fresh three-pound weakfish, split in two, remove spinal bone, then lay on a lightly buttered tin, cut side up. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, lightly baste with a little melted butter, then set in oven fifteen minutes. Bring it to oven door, place six thin slices raw lean bacon over the fish, sprinkle two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs over all, reset in oven and bake fifteen minutes more. Remove, then by means of a skimmer lift up the fish and the rest, dress on a hot dish, decorate with six quarters lemon and a little parsley greens. (If any gravy is left in the pan, pour it over the fish and serve.)
A plain baked split fish with a bacon-and-crumb finish. The original assumes you know your oven and can buy a whole weakfish; both need a word.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, which was normal for the period. Bake at 400F: hot enough to set the crumbs and render the bacon in the second fifteen minutes without drying a lean fish.
- WeakfishCynoscion regalis, also sold as squeteague or grey sea trout on the Atlantic coast. It is soft-fleshed, which is often said to explain why it was rarely seen far inland. Any lean white fish of similar size works the same way: striped bass, black sea bass, red drum, or a whole branzino scaled up in number.
- Splitting it"Split in two, remove spinal bone" means opening the fish out and lifting out the backbone; whether the two sides stay joined or are separated is not spelled out, though "cut side up" points to a single flat piece laid skin-side down. A fishmonger will do this; ask for it butterflied, head off, pin bones left in if that is easier.
- Total timeThirty minutes at 400F is right for a whole 3 lb butterflied fish, but check at twenty-five. The flesh should be opaque and just parting at the thickest point near the shoulder; weakfish in particular turns cottony if pushed.
- The baconThe recipe adds it only for the last fifteen minutes. Laid on from the start it would be more likely to steam and shed its fat into the pan; going on late it can crisp at the edges and baste the fish as it renders. Use thin, lean slices as specified, not thick-cut.
- "Lightly buttered tin"A shallow metal roasting pan or sheet pan with a rim. Line it with parchment if you want the fish to lift cleanly; a soft split fish is easy to break with a skimmer, and two wide spatulas work better.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt on three pounds of fish is about right, but the bacon adds more. If your bacon is heavily cured, cut the salt to three-quarters of a teaspoon.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish, headed and boned, feeds four generously.
Weakfish was one of the great cheap fishes of the American Atlantic seaboard in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, landed in quantity from Long Island south to the Carolinas and sold fresh in New York markets through the summer. The name has nothing to do with flavor or firmness on the plate: it is generally traced to the fish's tender mouth, which tears easily against a hook. Its other common name, squeteague, comes from a Narragansett word. The bacon-over-fish treatment is an old and practical one, used wherever a lean fish needed fat it did not have of its own.