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Carp, Baked
Wash, scale, and draw the fish. Squeeze over it the juice of two lemons, and let it remain in this for an hour, turning it at the end of half an hour. Put it into a dish, pour upon it three ounces of oiled butter, and strew over it two minced shallots. Cover it with oiled writing-paper, and bake it gently, basting it frequently. When it is nearly baked, melt three ounces of butter in a stewpan, and stir smoothly into it a table-spoonful of flour and a cupful of boiling water, a small salt-spoonful of salt, and a little cayenne. Let the sauce boil; then add to it gradually half a pint of new milk or cream, and, at the last moment, draw it from the fire and add the juice of a lemon. Mince finely four large gherkins, stir them into the sauce, and pour it over the fish. Time to bake, one hour. Sufficient for two persons.
A Victorian baked fish with a lemon cure and a sharp gherkin cream sauce. The two things worth adjusting are the baking time and the handling of the sauce.
- The hour in the ovenA whole carp of 2-3 lb is done at 145F at the thickest part, which takes roughly 25-40 minutes in a moderate oven. An hour taken literally today produces dry, cottony flesh; check the thickest part early.
- "Bake it gently"The book gives no temperature; read it as a moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 325-350F. The frequent basting and the paper cover are both there to stop the surface drying.
- Oiled writing-paperWriting-paper brushed with oil was the period's parchment. Use buttered baking parchment, or foil laid loosely so it does not press onto the skin.
- Oiled butterButter melted right down until it runs clear and oily rather than creamy; some cooks poured the clear fat off the milky solids, close to what is now called clarified butter. Plain melted butter works, but browns faster during the long basting.
- MeasuresA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon. Half a pint of milk in this book is 10 fl oz; a "cupful" of boiling water is genuinely loose here, so add it gradually to the roux and stop when the sauce coats a spoon.
- The sauce is the hingeThe milk or cream goes in gradually after the sauce has boiled, and the lemon juice only at the very last moment, drawn away from the fire. Acid can curdle a hot dairy sauce, though the flour gives some protection, and the gherkins need no more than warming through.
- Scaling and sourcing carpCarp scales are large and firmly set; work from tail to head with the back of a knife, ideally in a sink of water to contain them. Pond-raised carp can carry a muddy note, which the lemon steep may have been intended to mask.
- Bones and yieldCarp has a row of fine intermuscular Y-bones along the upper fillet that no amount of cooking dissolves. "Sufficient for two persons" is generous by modern serving habits and will stretch to three.
Carp were a managed crop long before they were a wild catch in western Europe, England included, where the fish was an introduction: monastic and manorial stew ponds kept them alive and to hand through Lent and the winter, and the fish's tolerance of still, warm, low-oxygen water made it the practical choice for a pond that had to be fished on demand. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, carp was slipping out of fashionable English cookery — it appears here as a workmanlike freshwater fish rather than a luxury — but the treatment preserves the old anxieties about it. The long steep in lemon juice, the shallots, the cayenne and above all the minced gherkins in the sauce are all aimed at the muddiness that pond fish were notorious for. Some earlier English cooks went further and kept a live carp in clean running water for days before killing it, a practice generally traced to the same concern. The sauce itself is a plain flour-and-butter binding enriched with milk or cream, the everyday backbone of Victorian fish cookery.