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July 7
Menu: Beef Broth with Vermicelli; Baked Bluefish; Cucumbers, French Dressing; Mashed Potatoes; Buttered Bermuda Onions; Heavenly Hash; Coffee Baked Bluefish-Select nice large bluefish, clean, and prepare it for baking. Wash it in salted water, and after drying it thoroughly, stuff with bread stuffing, and sew up opening and rub fish all over with salt. Then, having put small pieces of Crisco over, place in pan with enough water to cover bottom, and bake in hot oven 45 or 50 minutes. After it begins to bake, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Baste it often with liquid in pan and a little melted Crisco. When it is cooked and a nice color, remove carefully to hot plate. Do not break it. Serve with brown sauce poured round fish as garnish, or serve it in a separate dish. Iced Bouillon
A whole stuffed fish baked hot and fast, from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook. The method is sound; only the vessel, the fat and the doneness test need translating.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in this period is generally taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. That is right for a whole oily fish: the skin sets and browns before the flesh dries.
- Timing and donenessForty-five to fifty minutes implies a large fish, perhaps 4-5 lb, with a bread stuffing inside; the recipe never states a weight. Judge by an instant-read thermometer at the thickest part of the flesh, not by the clock: 140-145F, with the flesh separating cleanly from the backbone. A smaller fish of 2-3 lb will be done appreciably sooner, so start checking well before the stated time.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, then brand-new and sold as a modern substitute for lard and butter. Butter, or a neutral oil, does the same work here and browns better; the recipe's only requirement is a solid or semi-solid fat you can dot over the surface.
- Buying bluefishBluefish is very oily and turns strong-flavoured fast, so it wants to be as fresh as possible. Ask for it whole, gutted and scaled, gills and fins removed. Trimming the dark reddish strip of bloodline along the fillet reduces the assertive taste considerably.
- Sewing the cavityA larding or trussing needle and cotton kitchen twine is the traditional method; short metal skewers laced with twine are easier and hold just as well. Pack the stuffing loosely, or it will swell and split the belly.
- The pan liquid"Enough water to cover bottom" means a thin film, no more, perhaps a quarter inch. It is there to keep the drippings from scorching so they can be used for basting. Too much and the fish steams rather than bakes.
- Moving it wholeThe instruction not to break the fish is the hinge of the dish. Bake it on a sheet of parchment or a doubled strip of foil left long at both ends, and lift by those ends; two spatulas under a hot stuffed fish rarely end well.
- Brown sauceIn cookbooks of this period "brown sauce" usually means flour and fat cooked to a nut colour and let down with brown stock; in American household books this was often a plain browned-flour gravy rather than a classical espagnole. A pan gravy built on the drippings, or a simple stock-based brown sauce, gives the intended effect.
- YieldA 4 lb stuffed fish serves four to six as a main course.
The Story of Crisco appeared in 1913, two years after Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco, and it is a promotional cookbook in the fullest sense: 615 recipes written by Marion Harris Neil, many of them calling for the new hydrogenated shortening, arranged partly as a "Calendar of Dinners" so a housekeeper could cook her way through the year without deciding anything. Bluefish was one of the cheapest and most abundant fish on the Atlantic seaboard, landed in quantity through the warm months and sold whole in city markets; its high oil content makes it well suited to the dry heat of a hot oven, where a leaner fish would need protecting. The recipe also quietly does the book's real work, since baking a stuffed fish traditionally called for butter or salt pork over the top and basted through, exactly the role Crisco was being marketed to fill.