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Bream, to Dress
This handsome, but not very excellent fish, will eat best if broiled over a slow clear fire for half an hour. The inside must be thoroughly cleansed, but the scales should not be removed; and it should be wiped perfectly dry before it is put on the fire. Turn it so that both sides may be browned, and dredge a little flour if any cracks appear. Serve with melted butter and anchovy sauce. In carving, remove the scales and skin, and serve only what is underneath. Bream may be stuffed with a veal force-meat, and baked--it will take longer than the broiling process--or wrapped in a buttered paper, and placed in a moderate oven for about half an hour. It should be well basted in its own dripping and a little butter.
A whole fish cooked in its own armour: the scales are left on so they char and lift away with the skin, taking the muddy outer flesh with them. Everything else follows from that.
- The hinge: leave the scales onThe scales are the cooking vessel here. They shield the flesh from the fire and are peeled off with the skin at the table, which is why the recipe tells you to serve only what lies underneath. Scaling the fish first and then grilling it for half an hour would give you a dry, scorched result.
- "Broiled" means grilled over coalsIn a Victorian kitchen this is a gridiron over a slow, clear fire — embers with no flame and no smoke. A charcoal grill, kept to a cool zone, is the nearest match; a domestic overhead broiler runs far hotter and will need the fish lower and watched.
- Which breamThe recipe does not say which fish is meant. Freshwater bream (Abramis brama) is a coarse fish with a long-standing reputation for muddiness, which would fit "not very excellent"; sea bream or porgy, sold whole at 1-2 lb, was also dressed this way in period books and is generally reckoned better eating. Either behaves much the same on the grill.
- Half an hour is for a big fishHalf an hour is for a large fish -- the recipe gives no weight, but half an hour over a slow fire implies a sizeable whole fish cooked gently at a distance. A 1 1/2 lb bream needs roughly 6-8 minutes a side. Judge by the flesh at the thickest point of the backbone: opaque and parting from the bone, about 145F.
- Moderate oven350°F. The buttered-paper method is en papillote in all but name — parchment now, and a foil overwrap if you want to be sure of the seal.
- Melted butter is a sauceIn English books of this date "melted butter" is a flour-and-butter sauce thinned with water or fish stock, not simply clarified butter. Anchovy sauce is the same base with anchovy essence stirred in; anchovy paste mashed into a butter sauce gives the intended effect.
- Veal force-meatA stuffing of minced veal, suet or butter, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, herbs and egg to bind. Any well-seasoned bread-and-herb stuffing serves; keep the quantity modest or the fish will take much longer than the baked timing suggests.
- Dredging for cracksFlour dusted on a splitting patch seals it and stops the flesh drying. Do it sparingly and only where needed — a general flouring will simply burn on the grill.
- YieldOne whole fish of 2–3 lb serves two, or three at a table with several dishes. Reckon on losing a good deal to head, frame and the discarded skin.
Freshwater bream was a pond fish before it was a market fish: monastic and manorial stew-ponds across medieval England were stocked with bream, carp and tench precisely because they tolerated still, warm water and could be netted when needed. That same still water gave the flesh its muddy character, and by the nineteenth century bream had slipped down the scale of respectability \— Cassell's dismissal of it as "handsome, but not very excellent" suggests something of the Victorian view, though the recipe itself does not specify the freshwater fish. The remedy offered — grill it in its scales, strip the skin, and cover the rest with anchovy sauce — is of a kind often used for a fish more admired for its looks than its flavour.