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Dace
This fish, like many of its class, scarcely repays the trouble of cooking. But when seasonable, which it is from midsummer to nearly the end of the year, it is much enjoyed by many anglers. It should be either fried or broiled, and served with a sauce made of a little lemon-juice and cayenne pepper.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but the instruction is complete: scale and clean the fish, cook it hot and dry, and dress it with acid and heat. The gaps worth filling are what dace actually is, and what "broiled" meant in 1900.
- What dace isA small silver cyprinid of English rivers, usually 6-9 inches and 3-6 oz, related to roach and chub. It is essentially not a fishmonger's fish; this entry is aimed at anglers who caught their own supper.
- "Broiled" means grilledIn a Victorian kitchen broiling was direct radiant heat over coals, not oven-baking. Use a very hot grill or broiler, or a ridged pan, and give a fish this size only 2-3 minutes a side.
- The bones are the real problemDace is full of fine intermuscular bones, which may well be part of what "scarcely repays the trouble" means. Slashing the flanks to the bone at half-inch intervals before frying lets hot fat crisp and soften the small bones, a common treatment for bony river fish.
- Fry it dry and hardScale, gut, wipe dry, dust in seasoned flour or fine oatmeal, and fry in a shallow depth of very hot fat. The flesh is soft and watery, so any hesitation gives you a steamed, collapsing fish rather than a crisp one.
- The sauce, in proportionNo quantities are given. For four small fish, the juice of one lemon with cayenne to taste, about an eighth of a teaspoon, is the sense of it; melting a knob of butter into it turns a bare dressing into something closer to a sauce.
- Cook it throughFreshwater cyprinids can carry fish-borne parasites, so this is not a fish for any rare or raw treatment. Cooked hard as directed, it is fine.
- Season and legalityThe "midsummer to nearly the end of the year" window reflects the old coarse-fish close season, which protected spawning fish in spring. In England and Wales a rod licence and local byelaws still apply, and many fisheries now require coarse fish to be returned alive.
- YieldTwo to three whole fish per person as a small course.
Dace belonged to the angler, not the market. Nineteenth-century British cookery drew a sharp line between "game" fish worth a kitchen's attention — salmon, trout, turbot, sole — and the coarse fish of slow rivers, roach, chub, bream, gudgeon and dace, which were widely reckoned muddy and bony. The name is old, generally traced through Middle English darse to an Old French word for the fish, and shares a root with the sense of darting, which is what a shoal of them does in clear shallow water. The prescription of lemon juice and cayenne is the period's standard answer to any fish suspected of tasting of the river: sharp acid and pungent heat to cover a flat, soft flesh, the same logic that put mustard on herring. Small fry like gudgeon and dace were fried whole and eaten bones and all, a habit that faded from British tables in the twentieth century, perhaps as freshwater fishing came to be pursued more as a sport than as a way of getting dinner.