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Carp, Fried
Clean and empty the fish, dry it well with a cloth, split it open and lay it flat, being careful to remove the gall-stone, which will be found in the head, or it may give a bitterness to the dish. Dredge it well with flour, and sprinkle salt and cayenne over it, then fry it in plenty of hot butter or dripping till it is lightly browned. Lay it on some blotting paper to drain off the fat. Garnish with fried sippets, and the roes, also fried. Serve with anchovy sauce. Time, about twenty minutes. Sufficient for two persons.
A straightforward pan-fried freshwater fish, but carp demands more preparation than the terse instructions admit. Two things matter more than anything else: getting the gall out intact, and scaling the fish properly.
- The gallCarp has a genuinely bitter gall bladder, tucked against the liver in the body cavity rather than in the head as the text states. Lift it out whole with the viscera; if it breaks, rinse the cavity at once and cut away any yellow-stained flesh.
- Scales and skinCommon carp scales are large, hard and firmly seated. Scale from tail to head with the back of a knife under running water before gutting, or the crust will be inedible.
- MuddinessFarmed or wild carp from still water can taste of the pond. Soaking the split fish 30 minutes in salted water, or in water with a splash of vinegar, and stripping out the dark lateral streak of flesh both help.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping, the standard Victorian frying fat, gives the closest flavour to the original. Clarified butter is the alternative; whole butter will brown and burn over the time needed.
- TimingTwenty minutes suits a whole split fish of the size the recipe implies, enough for two; no weight is given. Reckon roughly 7-8 minutes a side in a wide pan over medium heat, and judge by the thickest part reaching 145F and the flesh parting from the bone rather than by the clock.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried crisp in the same fat. Cut them from a firm white loaf and fry them before the fish so the pan is not crowded.
- Blotting paperUse paper towels on a rack. Draining on a flat sheet steams the underside of the crust.
- The roeCarp roe is worth frying as directed, but the sacs burst readily; flour them and keep the heat moderate. Note that carp roe from some species is disagreeable to certain eaters, and the eggs of a few relatives of the carp family are considered toxic, so identify your fish.
- Anchovy sauceTraditionally a white or butter sauce sharpened with anchovy essence. A modern equivalent is melted butter with mashed anchovy fillets, lemon and a little parsley.
- BonesCarp carries fine intramuscular Y-bones that no filleting removes. Serve on the bone and warn the table.
Carp was the great pond fish of Europe, kept in monastic and manorial stewponds precisely because it survives crowding, warm water and transport in a barrel of wet weed. It is generally traced to central Asia and was spread westward by deliberate stocking; its arrival in England is conventionally placed in the late medieval or early Tudor period, though the documentary record is thin. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century carp had slipped well down the English table, outranked by sea fish that the railways now delivered fresh inland, and it survives in books of this kind largely as a country-house and angler's dish. The insistence on the gall stone is an old and much-repeated warning, passed from cookery book to cookery book for centuries, and the pairing with anchovy sauce is characteristically Victorian: a strong salty relish set against a mild, faintly earthy freshwater fish.