Clean and season a trout with salt, black pepper and cayenne. Lay in a baking-pan; dredge with flour; sprinkle with parsley and bits of butter; add a little water and vinegar. Let bake in a hot oven. Baste often with butter until done. Garnish with parsley and serve hot with cream sauce.
October 22 — No. 22
Swedish
A whole baked trout with a flour dredge and a butter-and-vinegar pan liquor. The method is sound; only the oven language and the vagueness of the liquid need translating.
- "A hot oven"In books of this vintage the term is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. A whole trout is thin enough that high heat is right — it sets the skin and finishes the fish before the flesh dries.
- The water and vinegarNo quantity is given. Enough to film the bottom of the pan is what is meant, perhaps 1/4 cup water to a tablespoon of vinegar for a single fish. It is there to keep the pan from scorching and to sharpen the drippings, not to poach the trout.
- Size and timingAssume one whole cleaned trout of about 1 to 1 1/2 lb. At 450F it wants 18–25 minutes; the flesh at the thickest part of the back should just flake from the bone and register 145F. The instruction to bake "until done" comes from a time before thermometers were usual in home kitchens, and tends to be read too generously.
- BastingThe dredge of flour plus repeated butter basting is what builds the browned crust. Baste every 5–7 minutes and use melted butter, not the pan liquid alone, or the flour stays pasty.
- CayenneA period recipe of this kind implies a pinch, used as background heat rather than a flavour of its own.
- Cream sauceNot whipped or poured cream but a white sauce: butter and flour cooked together, milk or cream whisked in, seasoned with salt; nutmeg was a common period addition. Make it while the fish bakes and hold it warm.
- YieldOne trout of this size serves one generously or two modestly. The recipe scales by simply laying more fish in the pan side by side, without crowding.
The books said to be titled 365 Dishes belong to a genre of daily-menu manuals popular in American households around the turn of the twentieth century, in which each date carries a single dish and a national label. What marks this one as plausibly Scandinavian is the vinegar in the pan: soured and vinegar-sharpened fish preparations run deep in Swedish cooking, from pickled herring to the sweet-sour dressings served with freshwater fish, and trout and char have long been staples of Swedish lake and river fishing. The pairing with a butter-and-flour cream sauce, however, is squarely the Anglo-American convention of the period. What the reader was buying in such books was less an authentic foreign recipe than the pleasure of naming a country at dinner.