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Grayling, Baked
Wash, scale, and empty the fish. Dry them; season them with salt and cayenne, and lay them in a shallow baking-dish, with three or four lumps of butter placed on them. Baste them now and then, and put a cover over the pan while they are cooking. Send them to table with sauce made of the gravy which runs from them, mixed with good melted butter. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, uncertain, as graylings are seldom offered for sale. Sufficient, one moderate-sized fish for two persons.
A plain baked whole fish, written for a catch that never reached the fishmonger. Two things need translating: the oven, which is never named, and "melted butter", which in Victorian English is a sauce rather than a puddle of fat.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, as was normal in Cassell's. A moderate oven, 350F, suits a covered dish of whole fish; the cover is there to trap steam so the flesh does not dry while the butter bastes it.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century cookery books melted butter means a thickened butter sauce — butter worked with a little flour and water or stock until it coats a spoon. Simply pouring liquid butter into the pan juices will give you a broken, greasy sauce instead.
- Half an hour is longThirty minutes suits a fish of a pound or more. Grayling and trout in the 8–12 oz range are done in 15–20 minutes at 350F; go by the flesh parting cleanly from the backbone, or 140F at the thickest part.
- Finding graylingThe note that they are "seldom offered for sale" still holds — grayling is a game fish, not a market fish, and in parts of Britain and Europe it is subject to close seasons or catch limits. Brown trout, rainbow trout or small char behave the same way in this recipe.
- ScalingGrayling scales are large; scrape from tail to head under cold running water before gutting, and rinse the cavity well. Dry the fish thoroughly or the seasoning will slide off and the skin will steam rather than colour.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a light dusting, not a chilli-forward heat — a pinch for two fish. Salt inside the cavity as well as on the skin.
- Butter quantity"Three or four lumps" is roughly 1 to 2 oz (30 o baste with and to form the base of the sauce.
- YieldOne moderate fish serves two, as stated; count on a 1 lb fish for two people with potatoes and bread alongside.
The grayling (Thymallus thymallus) is a clear-water river fish of northern Europe, long prized by anglers and largely unknown to shops — which is exactly why Cassell's gives no price for it. Izaak Walton and his successors wrote about it admiringly, and it is often said that a freshly caught grayling smells faintly of thyme, the trait its Latin name records. Because the fish arrived in the kitchen from a rod rather than a market, recipes for it stayed simple: seasoning, butter, a covered dish and the juices served as their own sauce. That same reticence explains why a large reference work like this one could only guess at the cost.