Home › The Principles of Cookery › Char
Char
This fish is considered a great delicacy, and is peculiar to the lakes of Cumberland; it is seldom offered for sale in the London market. The flesh is rather like that of trout. Wash the char, dry it with a soft cloth, dust it over with flour, and broil it gently till it is ready. Send piquante sauce in a tureen to table with it. Time to broil, ten or fifteen minutes. One medium-sized char will suffice for two persons.
A plain grilled fish with almost nothing to it, which means the two things that matter are the heat and the moment you stop. Everything else is sourcing.
- "Broil" means grillIn a British book of this date, to broil is to cook under or over direct radiant heat, not to bake in a covered dish. Use an overhead broiler on high with the fish about 4 inches from the element, or a hot charcoal grill.
- Buying charWindermere char is effectively unavailable commercially now; the stock is protected and fishing is tightly restricted. Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) is farmed in Iceland, Canada and Scotland and is widely available whole or as fillets; the Lakeland fish is the same species and behaves the same way in the pan. Sea trout or a small rainbow trout is a fair substitute.
- The hinge: stop earlyChar is leaner than salmon and goes dry and chalky the moment it is overdone. Pull it at 125-130F at the thickest point next to the backbone, or as soon as the flesh parts from the bone with gentle pressure. Ten to fifteen minutes suits a whole fish of about a pound, turned once; fillets need three to four minutes a side.
- The flour dustingA light dust of flour on a thoroughly dried fish gives a dry surface that browns and helps the skin release. Season the flour with salt and pepper, since the recipe gives no seasoning at all, and shake off the excess or it will taste pasty.
- Keep it from stickingOil the fish rather than the grate, and score the skin of a whole fish two or three times on each side so it does not curl and tear as it tightens.
- Sauce piquanteClassically a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and finished with shallots, capers and chopped gherkin. A modern cook can get the same effect with browned butter, capers, lemon and parsley, served separately in a tureen as the original directs.
- YieldOne medium char for two people, as stated; reckon on somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound whole. Allow one 6 oz fillet per person if you are buying it filleted.
Char were the pride of the Lake District, and Windermere in particular, where a distinct landlocked population of Arctic char has lived since the last ice age. Because the fish spoiled fast and travelled badly, the eighteenth and nineteenth century trade was mostly in potted char, packed in butter in shallow lidded pots and sent south as a luxury gift; the shallow decorated char pots survive in Cumbrian museums. The note that char is "seldom offered for sale in the London market" is an honest admission that most readers would never see one, and the entry is really here for completeness, in the manner of a dictionary rather than a shopping list. The Windermere stock is now much reduced and closely monitored, while farmed Arctic char has become a common fish elsewhere, so a recipe that was once nearly theoretical for a London cook is easier to follow today than it was when the book was written.