








































<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, 
Lake Superior Lake Trout
or the Venerable Wild-Caught Pacific Northwest Coast Coho 
(Silver) or Chinook (King) Salmon (although Chums (Pinks) and 
Sockeyes (Red) will also do)

By: Janet Gilmore

During my teen years in Eugene, Oregon in the 1960s, a family friend regularly went 
sport fishing for salmon off the Oregon Coast.  When he was successful, he sometimes 
offered my family a nice big whole salmon, a cause for a summer celebration.1 
Stuffed and baked, this magnificent fish was truly delectable—although in more 
recent years, split and roasted over an open fire according to Jamestown S’Klallam 
Elaine Grinnell’s traditional method has topped all salmon taste experiences.2

Among commercial fishing families in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, baked whitefish is also a 
treat, often anchoring a meal for a special occasion, when guests visit from afar.  Below, 
I offer a recipe for baked whitefish recorded from Eileen Behrend of the Ingallston area 
north of Menominee, Michigan in 1989.3  Eileen grew up in a commercial fishing family with 
deep roots in the tradition, and she has spent her married life in a fishing family, on Green 
Bay’s Western Shore.  Her recipe for stuffing and baking a good size northern Lake Michigan 
whitefish is very close to the one I have followed based on my childhood experience.  

When I get a fresh, whole big-bodied fish like Lake Michigan whitefish, Lake 
Superior lake trout, or a wild-caught salmon from the Pacific Northwest, I generally 
use Irma Rombauer’s recipe for Baked Fish in the 1946 edition of the Joy of 
Cooking (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 230) as my crutch, yet what I do is as much 
in opposition to the recipe as according to it.  Eileen’s recipe below is much like 
what I do, and so I will present a kind of recipe by “trilog” below, showing what 
Eileen says she does, and noting my variations and some of Rombauer’s.

 



<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

Fish Size:

Rombauer:

Scrape, remove the entrails, and clean:

 A fish weighing 3 or more pounds.

Janet:

A whole fish of at least three pounds and up to around five is a good bet.4

Temperature:

Eileen:

…when I bake fish I bake it …probably like 400 degrees instead of just 
the 350, and get ‘em nice and brown and crispy on the outside.

Janet:  

Rombauer’s recipe calls for 350 degrees, and I sometimes use that recommendation, yet 
I recall a written recipe of my mother’s for baked salmon that says 400 degrees, and I 
suspect that temperature will more effectively dry out the fish to the proper texture.

Preparation:

Eileen:

…I take the fish that I’m going to bake and clean it out, and I put stuffing in, just 
regular bread stuffing with a lot of onions, and salt and pepper and sage in…sometimes 
I tie the fish together, sometimes I don’t, if it’s a nice big whitefish it usually doesn’t 
need it.  And I lay it just on a baking pan, large pan, and I put a couple, some 
strips of bacon over the top of it, and bake it in a hot oven just until it’s done.



<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

Janet:  

I like a whole dressed and scaled fish that retains the head, tail, and fins, but whose cavity 
is well cleaned of entrails and blood against the backbone.  I make sure to wash the fish 
well inside and out, and pat it dry.  Then I prefer to rub the fish’s exterior well with olive 
oil, top and bottom, and place it on a large sheet of aluminum foil on a low-sided baking 
sheet (like a jelly roll pan that is approximately 16-17” long, 11-12” wide).  I arrange the 
fish crosswise and make sure that the heavyduty foil extends sufficiently beyond the pan 
and the fish to support the head and tail hanging slightly over each corner of the pan.

Stuffing:

I agree with Eileen’s stuffing recipe that features bread, lots of onions, 
and a minimal amount of herbs and/or spices.  I use Rombauer’s 
recommended Dressing I as a guide, “a fine but plain and unsophisticated 
dressing,” she says, for a fish of 3 pounds [increase for larger fish]. 

Combine:

1-1/2 cups bread crumbs

[I recommend a fine-textured, somewhat dry sourdough white or light rye bread]

2 Tablespoons chopped onion

 [I recommend much more liberal use of onion, perhaps sliced instead]

1/2 cup chopped celery

[I omit the celery as too strong a flavor for the delicacy of whitefish, 
say, while Eileen tells me that she also often adds celery]

2 Tablespoons chopped parsley [if she has it on hand, Eileen says]

1 or 2 beaten eggs [Eileen does not use eggs at all]

Season these ingredients well with:

1/2 teaspoon salt [I omit]



<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

1/8 teaspoon paprika [I comply, Eileen uses sage, black pepper, or other herbs and 

flavorings, according to her mood and what’s on hand]

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (optional) [I usually comply; Eileen does not]

Use enough:

Milk, melted butter or soup stock to make a loose dressing.  [Eileen and I mostly skip this

step, preferring drier stuffing]

Fill the fish.  Sew the sides together with a coarse needle and thread.  

[Like Eileen, I stuff the fish loosely and mass any extra along the 
opening to the cavity.  I do not sew the stuffing into the fish.]

Baking:

I loosely shape the foil around the head and tail, leaving the rest of the fish 
open to the oven.  Eileen meanwhile prefers a fish without head and tail.

Eileen:

Usually, I would say, it takes a couple hours for say a four 
pound fish.  It just depends on the size of the fish. 

Janet:

Rombauer recommends 15 minutes per pound of fish at 350 degrees, so if you choose 
the higher temperature, be watchful.  I do not use bacon on the top of the fish like 
Irma and Eileen do, nor do I baste the fish during baking as Rombauer recommends.

Testing for Doneness:

Eileen:



<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

I just poke it with a fork or lift up the edge of it, and if it’s white opaque all the way 
through, then it’s done.  You can usually tell by the brown-ness on the outside.  It 
doesn’t get brown and crispy until the fish is done.  The inside stays softer.

Janet:

I also poke the fish, at the fullest part of the body, using the point of 
a small paring knife.  I look for an opaque, flakey, and dry texture.  If 
the area poked fills with liquid, the fish is not yet done.

Serving:

The foil acts as a handy lift to transfer the fish to a serving platter, if presentation 
on one is desired.  If the bottom of the fish has been adequately slathered with 
olive oil before the stuffing is added, the entire fish might yield to transfer from the 
foil onto a platter.  There are tricks for cutting baked fish into appropriate serving 
chunks relatively free of bones, but these methods depend on the fish, its size, 
and family aesthetics, and conveying them here resists written description.

Enjoy that Baked Stuffed Fish!

    Janet Gilmore and Eileen Behrend, with a little help from

      Irma Rombauer—and Dorothy Gilmore



<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

Notes
1 The family friend, Chuck Hayes, was also our appliance repair person at the time.  
According to 2014-2015 conversations with my mother, Dorothy Gilmore (now in her 
90s), Chuck had gone offshore fishing for salmon with a friend for years, but he always 
got seasick.  Since his seasickness lasted for a day after he brought home the fish, 
he’d bring it directly to my mother so she could cook it while fresh, typically the next 
day.  Chuck and some mutual friends would join us then in enjoying the stuffed, baked 
fish.  My mother cannot recall the first time she baked a stuffed, whole salmon, and 
suggests many influences, including the wedding gift of Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking 
in 1948.  Besides friends celebrating whole salmon planked in celebratory feasts, she 
attributes my dad’s high country trout fishing and taste for fish as contributing—and 
not so much her Norwegian-American heritage.  By the late 1950s, she recalls that she 
had enough experience and confidence in the dish to offer a baked, stuffed salmon as 
the centerpiece for an “early American” themed potluck dinner.  My parents’ rotating 
dinner collective of artist and architect friends brought side dishes associated with 
New England food traditions, like baked beans and clam chowder, expressing surprise 
at Pacific salmon on the menu.  My mother enjoyed the tease!  When I asked her by 
phone how to bake a stuffed fish, once I was cooking on my own in the 1970s, she 
directed me to Rombauer’s recipe and the flexibility of the stuffing guidelines.

2 See Elaine Grinnell biography, interview script and sound 
recording on “The Cultural Conservancy” website at http://www.
nativeland.org/raft/grinnell.html (access February 28, 2015).

3 Festival of Michigan Folklife fieldwork, Michigan Traditional Arts Program, Michigan 
State University Museum, East Lansing.  Eileen Kleinke Behrend (b. late 1930s) has 
lived her entire life a quarter mile from Lake Michigan, on the western shore of Green 
Bay, north of Menominee, Michigan.  She is Swedish and Norwegian on her mother’s 
side, Cape Cod Yankee (fishing people) and German on her father’s.  Her father 
fished for a living and she helped him with his work whenever she got the chance.  
After she married fisher-logger David Behrend in the 1950s, she contributed to their 
business over the years, fetching parts and supplies and going out in the fishing 
boats when she got the chance.  Long active in the commercial fishing business, she 
learned to handle and dress fish, and tell when it is fresh.  From her mother, she 
learned to cook and preserve fish in many ways, when she was growing up.  After 
she married, she cooked fish, and more varieties of fish, more often, since her 



<Gilmore, Janet. “Stuffed Baked Northern Great Lakes Whitefish, Lake Superior Lake Trout...” 
  Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 4:1 (2015): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2015

husband enjoyed eating fish more frequently than her family did.  Behrend has been 
active in developing the West Shore Fishing Museum on M-35 north of Menominee, 
an organization dedicated to keeping Great Lakes commercial fishing history alive.

4 In recent years, I’ve successfully used two smaller whole whitefish, arranging them 
on their sides with their bellies facing each other, which I stuff and then push slightly 
together with extra stuffing placed between.  I’ve also used two large whitefish 
fillets successfully, placing one skin side down, distributing the stuffing on top, and 
covering it with the second fillet, skin side up. Inspired by Andreas Viestad’s “Fried 
Herring with Apple, Bacon and Celeriac” recipe from the “New Scandinavian Cooking” 
TV show and website, I’ve found a bacon, turnip, celeriac, chiogga beet, apple, and 
carrot stuffing, mixed with a medium dice of tasty sourdough bread crumbs, quite 
delicious when using the two whitefish fillet option.  See http://www.newscancook.
com/recipes-by-chef/fried-herring-with-apple-bacon-and-celeriac/ (accessed 
February 28, 2015). through the Middle Ages. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.


