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Gudgeon, Fried
Cleanse the fish thoroughly, take out the inside, and remove the gills, but do not scrape off the scales. Wipe them dry with a soft cloth, dip them in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot dripping or lard till nicely browned. Time, about four minutes to fry. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient, about four for one person.
A straightforward small-fish fry from a book that assumed the cook had access to a river. The only real work is in the preparation, since four minutes in hot fat is the whole of the cooking.
- The fish itselfGudgeon (Gobio gobio) is a small European freshwater fish, rarely more than 5-6 inches, and is not sold in shops. Smelt, sand eels, very small sardines or fresh anchovies fry the same way and in the same time.
- Why the scales stay onThe recipe is explicit that the scales are left on; gudgeon scales are small, and the instruction is presumably to spare the skin of so delicate a fish. If you substitute a fish with coarse scales, scale it.
- Gutting small fishSlit from vent to gill and draw the innards out with the tip of a finger or a skewer; the gills lift out with the point of a knife, as the book directs.
- Dry means dryThe wiping with a soft cloth is the hinge. Egg will not grip a wet fish, and any water left on the skin spits violently in the fat and lifts the crumbs off in sheets.
- Dripping and lardBoth are still sold and both give a cleaner flavour here than seed oil. Any fat with a high smoke point works; the book asks only for it to be hot, i.e. hot enough that a crumb sizzles at once.
- Depth of fatThe recipe does not say. Shallow frying in about a quarter-inch of fat, turning once, will work for fish this size. Four minutes total is right for something the length of a finger; larger substitutes need longer, judged by the crumb colour.
- YieldFour fish per person, as stated, is a modest first course. Serve immediately with lemon and salt; crumbed fried fish loses its crispness within minutes of leaving the pan.
Gudgeon was a fish of the amateur angler rather than the market, common in the gravelly reaches of English rivers and easy enough to catch in numbers that Victorian fishing parties on the Thames often ended with a fry-up at a riverside inn. Cassell's gives the cost as "uncertain"; one might guess that the fish had no reliable retail price because it was generally brought home rather than bought, though the book does not say so. The dish belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century small-fry preparations, alongside whitebait and smelts, in which the fish is eaten whole and the crumb coating does most of the work. The word gudgeon also carried a second, older sense in English, meaning a gullible person who will swallow anything, a slur traditionally traced to the fish's reputation for taking any bait offered.