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Forcemeat for Carp
Prepare from a stale loaf half a pound of crumbs, and mince one dozen oysters, divested of beards; add two ounces of finely-shredded suet, and the same of bacon or ham, and good fresh butter. Flavour with salt, nutmeg, a dessert-spoonful of savoury herbs, and a little parsley, all of which should be minced small. Blend together with three well-beaten eggs. Stuff the fish, and sew up securely. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for one fish.
A Victorian oyster-and-suet stuffing for a whole baked carp. It is a stiff, bready forcemeat meant to hold its shape inside a sewn-up fish, and the quantities need a little interpretation before you start.
- Half a pound of crumbsThat is roughly 3 to 4 packed cups of fresh crumbs from a stale, close-textured loaf — no crusts. Modern sandwich bread gives a pastier result; a day-old sourdough or country loaf grated coarse is closer to what was intended.
- The butter is unmeasuredThe butter quantity is ambiguous -- "two ounces of finely-shredded suet, and the same of bacon or ham, and good fresh butter" can be read as two ounces of butter too, or as leaving the butter to the cook's judgement. Either way, about two ounces, matching the suet and bacon, gives a forcemeat that binds without weeping fat into the fish.
- Oyster beardsThe "beard" is the dark frilled gill fringe around the edge of the shucked oyster, which stays tough and gritty. Trim it away with scissors and keep the liquor to moisten the crumbs if the mix seems dry.
- SuetShredded beef suet is still sold, often shelf-stable and pre-shredded, and works as written. Cold grated butter is the usual substitute, though the stuffing will be softer.
- Savoury herbsA dessert-spoonful means about two teaspoons. "Savoury herbs" was an elastic term; the mixtures usually meant are along the lines of thyme, marjoram and savory, sometimes with a little sage. Use the same volume of fresh chopped thyme and marjoram if you prefer, plus the parsley called for separately.
- Cook it throughThe stuffing contains raw egg and raw oyster, plus uncooked bacon if you use bacon rather than ham, so the fish has to be baked until the centre of the forcemeat is fully set and hot, not just until the flesh flakes. The recipe gives no oven instruction; judge by the cavity rather than the shoulder, and allow considerably longer than an unstuffed fish of the same weight.
- Sewing upCoarse cotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle, with stitches close enough that the forcemeat cannot swell out. Skewers laced with twine work if you have no needle. Remove the thread before serving.
- Yield and costThe recipe says only that it is sufficient for one fish; the volume suits a large whole carp. The "2s." is two shillings for the whole forcemeat, oysters included, which suggests oysters were not then the luxury they are now.
Carp was a pond fish before it was a wild one: monastic and manor stew-ponds kept it alive and to hand through the winter. Because pond carp can taste muddy and its flesh is soft and rather bland, English cookery leaned hard on the stuffing, and a rich bread forcemeat carrying oysters, suet and bacon does most of the flavouring here. Oysters in a stuffing look extravagant now but were far more ordinary in the nineteenth century, when they were cheap enough to pad out beef pies and sauces, though supplies and prices were already tightening by the 1870s. Victorian kitchens treated stuffings as a standing repertoire — one for veal, one for hare, one for carp — rather than as an afterthought to a single dish.