The Game Fish, of the Northern States and British Provinces / With an account of the salmon and sea-trout fishing of Canada and New Brunswick, together with simple directions for tying artificial flies, etc., etc.

by Robert Barnwell Roosevelt

Frying is with butter or grease alone; stewing with grease and a little water; and boiling with water alone. You determine when things are done by the color and trying how they resist a fork. An excellent chowder is made by putting pork, fish, cracker, meat, clams, and anything else that is handy, with vegetables, sufficient seasoning, and a little water, and stewing it well. Stewing can hardly be carried to excess, as from the closeness of the vessel the nutritious particles cannot escape.

The best omelette the tyro can make, and excellent it will be found, is by frying eggs, which are first beaten up and seasoned, till they are not quite firm. They must be stirred all the while to keep them from burning, and if they are done hard are ruined.

A white sauce is made of flour and butter well mixed together, stirred into hot water and allowed to boil for a few minutes; a hard boiled egg may be chopped up and added if desired. This is the appropriate sauce for salmon. A brown gravy is made from the drippings of the meat, and some burnt sugar or browned crumbs added and warmed up.

The following is an accurate recipe for griddle cakes: one pint of boiled rice, three tablespoonfuls of flour, two tablespoonfuls of milk and two eggs. While for fried cakes it will be observed that flour, milk and eggs are used, for ordinary cakes flour, butter and eggs are necessary, with sugar added for sweetening. Thus, a good cake is made of five cups of flour, three cups of sugar, two cups of butter and four eggs. This cake must be baked slowly, which could be done in a piece of birch bark inclosed in heated stones, allowing room for it to rise.

The simplest and best way to boil a salmon is to slash him on the sides with vertical cuts to the bone, having previously drawn, opened and cleaned him, to wash him well in the nearest spring, put him into boiling water sufficiently salt to bear an egg, and cook him seven or eight minutes to every pound of weight, and serve him with some of the water he was cooked in for sauce. The latter may be thickened with flour and butter. He should, like all other fish, be cooked fresh.

Broiled fish, or, if they are large, slices of fish, cook better wrapped in a piece of paper oiled; and the one-half of a salmon spread out, tacked on a board and roasted by a hot fire is excellent; and in cooking small fish suspended by a twig near the fire, Frank Forester recommends that a small stick with a piece of pork threaded on it, should be inserted to keep the belly open, and a biscuit placed below to catch the drippings. A hot fire will cook a fish thus in ten minutes.

To bake a fish he is wrapped in oiled paper or birch bark, and placed in an oven built of stones laid in a hollow, and from which the fire has just been removed, other heated stones are placed above him, and the fire is raked back over the whole.

It will be hardly necessary to remark, in connection with these directions, that fish must be cleaned and have the gills removed and be well washed and scaled before they can be cooked; that when the word butter is used, and my reader have no butter, he must use such grease or oil as he may have; that in all cases he can add such sauces and spices to his condiments as he may relish and possess. Among all the variety of prepared sauces, anchovy for salmon and Worcestershire for meats are the best, but lemon alone gives an excellent flavor.

To bread anything, whether it be fried oysters or fried eels, dip them in the yolk of egg beaten up, and then in cracker pounded fine, or they may first be dipped in flour and afterward in egg and cracker.

Tea is made by pouring a little hot water on the leaves and allowing it to draw by the fire for ten minutes and then filling up with hot water. Coffee, by putting the coffee, mixed with the yolk of an egg, into boiling water and allowing it to boil once—no more, on your life. If you do not wish to use an egg, put in a teaspoonful of cold water immediately on taking it from the fire. This is done to clear it. Chocolate is made by melting a cake broken into small pieces in warm water, adding a cup of milk after it is perfectly smooth, and boiling for twenty minutes. An excellent tea is made of yellow birch bark.