Home › Soups › Fish-Baked, with Stuffing
Fish-Baked, with Stuffing
stuffing:
Select a fish weighing from 2 to 4 pounds.
Bake with the following 1-41-41-8 teaspoon pepper Few drops onion juice, if liked 1 cup crumbs (bread cup melted fat or crackers, or half and half) teaspoon salt teaspoon celery salt 1/4 cup water Mix ingredients in order given. If a dry filling is desired, the water may be omitted. Three tablespoons catsup, chopped parsley, capers, pickles, or oysters may be added. Clean and wipe the fish. Rub the inside with salt. Fill with stuffing and sew together. Cut diagonal gashes 1½ inches apart on both sides of the fish and place a strip of bacon or salt pork fat in each gash. Brush with melted fat, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Dredge with flour, tie in the shape of a letter "S" and bake in a dripping pan. When the flour is browned, baste the fish once in 10 minutes. Cook until the flesh is firm and separates easily from the bone.
A whole baked stuffed fish of the plain American sort, written when cooks were trusted to judge their own oven. The instructions for handling the fish are complete; the filling quantities are the weak point.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A whole fish of 2 to 4 lb bakes well at 400F; lower than that and the flour dredge never browns, higher and the thin belly dries before the shoulder is done.
- Judging doneness"Firm and separates easily from the bone" corresponds to about 145F at the thickest point. Reckon roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness measured at the shoulder, or 15 to 20 minutes per pound, and start checking early.
- The stuffing quantitiesMost of the ingredient list has come through garbled; only the 1/8 teaspoon pepper and two quarter-measures are legible. For 1 cup of crumbs, a workable reconstruction is about 1/4 cup melted fat, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon celery salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper and 1/4 cup water, and taste before it goes in the fish.
- Enough stuffingThe book gives one cup of crumbs for the whole 2 to 4 lb range; for a fish at the top of it you may want to double the quantity to fill the cavity.
- Dripping panA shallow roasting pan. Fish sticks badly to bare metal; set it on a greased sheet of parchment or a rack, which also makes it possible to lift the fish out whole.
- The gashes and the porkThe diagonal cuts hold the strips of salt pork or bacon, whose fat runs into a lean fish as it cooks. The recipe specifies only that they be 1 1/2 inches apart on both sides; it does not say how deep.
- Tying in an "S"Tying in an 'S' -- The book gives no reason for the shape. It can be skipped; plain straight baking works, and kitchen string round the body every few inches is enough to hold things together alongside the sewn cavity.
- Fish to chooseAnything firm-fleshed and round-bodied in the 2 to 4 lb range: whole striped bass, bluefish, snapper, trout, mackerel. Have the fishmonger scale and gut it.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish with stuffing serves four.
Baking a whole fish with a bread stuffing, larded through cuts in the sides with salt pork, is a long-established technique in American cookery, carried over from English practice and suited to lean inshore fish that would otherwise dry in the oven. The strips of pork fat do the work that oil does in a modern recipe. The suggested additions -- bottled catsup, capers, pickles and oysters -- are all shelf-stable flavourings a housekeeper would be likely to have on hand. The compressed phrasing and the absence of an oven temperature assume a reader who knows how her own oven behaves.