Boil a trout well seasoned; add 1 sliced onion, 1 carrot chopped, 2 sprigs of parsley and 1 bay-leaf, a few peppercorns and 1 tablespoonful of butter. When done, beat the yolks of 2 eggs with a little cream; add salt and a pinch of cayenne. Remove the fish to a platter. Mix the egg sauce with the water in which the fish was cooked; add ½ cup of cream. Let get very hot and pour over the fish. Garnish with parsley. Serve hot.
A poached trout with a warm egg-and-cream sauce built on the cooking liquid — essentially a thin sabayon-thickened velouté. The whole dish hinges on keeping that sauce below a simmer.
- Never let the sauce boilEgg yolks set at around 160-180F. Once the yolks go into the poaching liquid, keep the pan over low heat and stir constantly; "let get very hot" means steaming, not bubbling. A boil curdles it into scrambled egg in flecks.
- Read "boil" as poachA hard boil tears trout skin and toughens the flesh. Bring the seasoned water to a bare shiver, 170-180F, and hold it there. A 10-12 oz whole trout is done in 8-10 minutes; the flesh should just part from the backbone.
- The vegetables are a court bouillonOnion, carrot, parsley, bay and peppercorns go into the water with the fish, not around it as a garnish. A splash of dry white wine or a spoonful of vinegar in the water is a common court-bouillon addition and sharpens the finished sauce, though this recipe calls for neither.
- Strain and reduceThe recipe pours the whole cooking liquid into the sauce, which gives a thin result. Strain out the vegetables and boil the liquid down to about a cup before you begin tempering the yolks into it.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks with the "little cream," then whisk a ladle of the hot strained liquid into them before returning the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to hot broth is the usual way this sauce fails.
- Cream quantities"A little cream" for the yolks is a tablespoon or two; the half cup that follows is the body of the sauce. Use heavy cream — modern light cream and half-and-half are more likely to separate when heated with yolks.
- CayenneA pinch means a pinch. The dish is meant to taste of fish and cream, with the pepper only lifting the finish.
- YieldOne trout serves one generously or two modestly; the sauce as written is enough for two fish if you double the yolks.
"A la normandie" points to Normandy, the dairy and cider country of northern France, and in kitchen French it was often said to be shorthand for almost any fish finished with cream, butter and egg — the classic sauce normande of the Escoffier repertoire is a fish velouté enriched with yolks and cream in exactly this manner. What appears here is a simplified household version: no separately made stock, no mushroom or oyster liquor, just the poaching water pressed into service as the base. Books of this kind, which assigned one nation to each day of the year, taught American cooks to think of foreign cuisines as a set of recognisable formulas, and cream-and-egg fish sauce was the badge of France. The trout is a sensible choice for the period, when freshwater fish still reached inland tables far more reliably than sea fish did.