Season a trout and let cook with 1 sliced onion, 1 sliced lemon, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, a few cloves and a pinch of pepper. Add cinnamon, ¼ cup of raisins and 1 tablespoonful of butter. When done, remove to a platter. Add some brown sugar, lemon-juice and chopped parsley to the sauce; let boil and pour over the fish. Serve cold. Garnish with parsley.
A terse turn-of-the-century entry that assumes you know how to poach a fish. The method is the classic sweet-and-sour Jewish fish preparation, served cold in its own jellied sauce.
- The missing liquidNo water or stock is listed, but the fish cannot cook in two tablespoons of vinegar alone. Barely cover the trout with water in a wide pan, add the vinegar and aromatics, and poach at a bare simmer.
- Poaching timeA whole trout of about 1 lb takes 12-15 minutes at a shiver, not a boil; thick steaks or fillets need 8-10. Vigorous boiling shreds the flesh and clouds the sauce.
- "Season" and quantitiesSalt, at minimum; the recipe specifies its pepper separately. A "few cloves" is presumably 3 or 4 whole ones. The form of the cinnamon is not given; a small stick will leave the sauce clearer than ground.
- The butter is unusualButter with fish is permitted under kosher law, since fish is neither meat nor dairy; it could not, however, be served alongside a meat meal, for which oil or schmaltz would substitute.
- Reducing the sauceAfter the fish comes out, boil the poaching liquid down hard until it coats a spoon before adding brown sugar and lemon juice. Unreduced, it will pool thinly around the fish instead of setting.
- Balance by tasteThe brown sugar and lemon juice are unmeasured. Start with a tablespoon of each and adjust to taste.
- Serving coldChill at least four hours, ideally overnight. The liquid may set to a loose jelly, though one trout gives up little gelatin. Note that the recipe boils the chopped parsley into the sauce; if you want it green, add it after chilling instead.
- YieldOne trout serves two as a first course, one as a light main. Scale directly for larger fish.
This is the sweet-and-sour cold fish preparation familiar from Ashkenazi kitchens, built on vinegar, sugar and dried fruit. Its logic is Sabbath logic: fish cooked on Friday, eaten cold on Saturday when no cooking is permitted, with the acid and sugar doing double duty as seasoning and preservative. The raisins, cinnamon and cloves point to the medieval sweet-sour tradition that is generally held to have survived longest in Central and Eastern European Jewish cooking after it faded from the Christian tables around it. Its appearance here, in a dated calendar of nationality-labelled dishes, reflects the period's appetite for cataloguing immigrant foodways, usually compressed into a paragraph and stripped of the ritual context that gave the dish its shape.