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Baked Trout
Clean, wash, and wipe the fish, which should be large; prepare a stuffing of fine bread crumbs, salt, pepper and herbs, add with this a beaten egg. Stuff the fish and sew it up; place in a baking pan with about two gills of water, and a piece of butter the size of an egg. Baste with water and butter until don and well browned. Place the fish on a hot dish; then add to the gravy a tablespoonful of browned flour; wet with cold water a spoonful of catsup, little lemon juice and a glass of wine. Pour the gravy around the dish.
A whole stuffed baked fish in the plain nineteenth-century manner, finished with a pan gravy thickened by browned flour. The original gives no oven heat and no timing, so those are the two things worth settling before you start.
- Oven and timingThe original gives neither, so both are modern choices: a moderate oven of around 375F works. The familiar "10 minutes per inch of thickness" rule assumes a hotter oven, so at this heat allow longer, plus extra for the stuffing; go by whether the flesh at the backbone flakes and reads 145F. A 3-4 lb trout will likely take somewhere around 40-50 minutes.
- Two gills of waterA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup in the pan. It is there to make basting liquid and gravy, not to poach the fish, so keep it shallow.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Standard period shorthand, and reasonably consistent across books of this era.
- A glass of wineA period wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. The recipe does not say which wine; sherry or madeira would suit, though white table wine is also plausible. The gravy is small in volume, so add it gradually and taste.
- CatsupAn unqualified "catsup" in nineteenth-century books may mean mushroom or walnut catsup, a thin dark savoury condiment closer to Worcestershire than to the sweet tomato sauce sold now, though tomato catsup was also common by the later part of the century. If you use modern tomato ketchup, expect the gravy to taste noticeably sweeter.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured. It thickens less than raw flour, so a tablespoon in this quantity of pan liquid gives a thin gravy. Slake it with cold water into a smooth paste before it goes in, or it will lump.
- Stuffing quantityFor a 3-4 lb fish, about 2 cups of fine dry crumbs bound with the one beaten egg the recipe calls for. The original adds no fat to the stuffing, though a little melted butter helps it hold. Pack it loosely; crumb stuffing swells.
- Sewing it upTrussing needle and cotton twine work, but two or three short metal skewers laced with twine are easier to remove at table. Take them out before the fish goes on the hot dish.
- HerbsUnspecified, as usual for the period. Parsley, thyme and a little marjoram or savory are in keeping; lemon zest in the crumbs is not, but suits the finished sauce.
- YieldA 3-4 lb fish serves four to six as a main course.
Whole baked stuffed fish with a bread-crumb forcemeat is a long-established dish in English and American cookery, and by the time this book appeared it was a familiar way of presenting a large fish whole at table. Trout appears in American cookbooks earlier as well, but came in greater quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, when railway ice cars and the spread of commercial hatcheries put freshwater fish on tables far from the streams it came out of. The finishing gravy here is a small lesson in period technique: browned flour was a standard thickener for a dark sauce before commercial stock bases existed, and the catsup called for may well have been a mushroom or walnut extract, a household condiment made to give exactly this kind of savoury depth.