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Baked Trout
Clean brook trout, season with salt, black pepper, and paprika. Lay in Criscoed baking pan, dredge with flour, sprinkle with chopped parsley and bits of Crisco, pour over little vinegar and water, and bake in hot oven until done, basting often with Crisco. Garnish with parsley, and serve hot with cream sauce.
A whole-fish bake from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, written for cooks who already knew what a trout looked like when it was done. The quantities are left entirely to judgement, so the useful work here is fixing temperature, timing and fat.
- "Hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat a whole brook trout of 8-12 oz should cook through in about 15-20 minutes; a pound-and-a-half fish nearer 25-30.
- Doneness is the hinge"until done" is the recipe's weak point. The flesh should just turn opaque and separate from the backbone at the thickest part; current food-safety guidance for fish is 145F, and trout goes dry and cottony quickly past that, which the basting will not rescue.
- CriscoStill sold, but the 1910s product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil and the modern product has been reformulated. Butter, or a mix of butter and a neutral oil, does everything asked of it here and tastes better on fish.
- "Criscoed"Simply greased. The verb was house style in this book, which was written to sell the shortening.
- The vinegar and waterNo quantity is given. A few tablespoons of each is plenty for a pan of two to four fish; it is there to make steam and cut the richness, not to poach. Cider vinegar or white wine vinegar suits trout better than distilled.
- DredgingFlour on a wet, oiled fish in a hot oven gives a thin crust rather than a fried one. Pat the trout dry first or it will go pasty.
- Cream sauceA plain béchamel of the period: butter, flour, milk, salt and a little white pepper, cooked until it no longer tastes of raw flour. A squeeze of lemon at the end is a modern improvement the book would not have objected to.
- YieldOne 8-12 oz trout per person. Four fit comfortably in a large roasting pan without crowding, which matters if you want the flour to brown at all.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s, shortly after Crisco was introduced, and it belongs to a genre of cookbook published to teach American cooks what to do with a brand-new ingredient: a solid vegetable fat that behaved like lard but kept better and carried no flavour. Recipes throughout the book call for it, often where butter or drippings would have been traditional, which is why a delicate baked trout is basted with shortening. Brook trout itself was a common enough table fish in the period, sold locally and often caught rather than bought, and baking a whole fish with a little acidulated liquid and a flour dredge was standard practice long before Crisco existed; the cream sauce alongside is the plain white sauce that anchored American cookery of the era.