Baked Pickerel
Have fish clean and wipe dry, rub inside with a little salt and pepper; fill with a dry stuffing; sew it up and put in a hot pan with some drippings and a little butter; dredge with flour and lay over the fish a few thin slices of salt pcrk or bits of butter, and bake an hour and a half, basting occasionally with the butter and a little water.
A plain nineteenth-century baked stuffed fish, written for a cook who already knew what size fish she had. The one thing to change is the time.
- The timing is the hingeAn hour and a half will reduce almost any pickerel to dry flakes. Figure roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, measured with the stuffing in place, and take the fish to 140-145F at the backbone. A 3-4 lb whole pickerel usually needs 35-45 minutes.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature. "Hot pan" refers to the pan itself, most likely preheated with the drippings in it so the skin sets on contact instead of sticking; a moderate to hot oven, 350-400F, suits the method.
- What a pickerel isOne of the smaller members of the pike family (Esox), and loosely a small pike; in parts of Canada the name is also used for walleye. Walleye, northern pike or a whole trout of similar size all work; so does a 3 lb whole bass. Nothing else in the method changes.
- The bonesPike and pickerel carry a row of Y-shaped intermuscular bones along the upper fillet that no amount of cooking dissolves. Cook the fish whole as written, then lift the flesh off in sections at the table and warn anyone eating it.
- Dry stuffingA period dry stuffing is stale breadcrumbs with butter, chopped onion, salt, pepper and sage or summer savory, bound with very little or no liquid so it absorbs the fish juices. Allow about 2 cups for a 3 lb fish and pack it loosely.
- Sewing it upButcher's twine and a trussing needle do the job, but two or three short metal skewers laced with twine are easier to remove and hold just as well.
- Salt porkThin slices of salt pork baste the fish as they render and were the standard substitute for a fatty fish's own oil. Blanch the slices a minute in boiling water first if your pork is very salty, or use pancetta or thin-cut bacon. Given the pork, go lightly on the salt inside the fish.
- BastingThe butter-and-water basting keeps the flour dredge from scorching and the flesh from drying out. Baste two or three times over the shorter cooking window; the pan liquid, thickened with a spoonful of flour, makes the sauce.
- YieldA 3-4 lb stuffed fish serves four to six as a main course.
Pickerel and pike were everyday freshwater fish across the northern United States and Canada in the nineteenth century, cheap where they were caught and rarely shipped far, which is why they turn up in general household cookbooks like this one rather than in restaurant cookery. The method here — stuff, sew, dredge, bard with salt pork, bake and baste — is a common American treatment for large lean fish of the period, applied to shad, bass, cod and haddock alike; the salt pork is doing the work that oil or a rich sauce would do in a French kitchen. Long baking times of the kind given here were usual in books written when oven temperature could not be measured and cooks erred toward certainty.