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Perch, Boiled
Wash the fish in lukewarm water to take off the slime, scale it carefully, empty it, take out the gills, cut off the fins, place the fish in boiling salted water, and keep it boiling until the perch is done enough. In order to ascertain when this point is reached, press the fish with the fingers; if it gives way to the touch it is done. Take it up, drain it, and serve on a hot dish. Garnish with parsley, and send melted butter, parsley sauce, or Dutch sauce, to table in a tureen. Time, about a quarter of an hour for a moderate-sized fish. Probable cost, uncertain, perch being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient for one person.
A plain court-bouillon treatment for a small freshwater fish, written when perch came from a line rather than a counter. Two things need adjusting: the heat and the clock.
- Simmer, do not boilHeld at a rolling boil, a perch of half a pound will break apart and the skin will shred before the centre is set. Bring the salted water to the boil, slide the fish in, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles.
- The timingA quarter of an hour is long by modern practice. A moderate perch of 8-12 oz needs roughly 6-10 minutes at a bare simmer; the flesh should just part from the backbone, or read about 135F at the thickest point. The finger test in the original works, but it tells you the fish is done rather than nearly done.
- Salt the water properlyNo quantity is given. About 1 tablespoon of salt per quart is the usual working strength for poaching fish; unsalted water leaves the flesh flat and washed-out.
- Handle the spinesPerch carry stiff, sharp dorsal spines and a spiked gill cover. Snip the fins off with kitchen shears before scaling, and work from tail to head. The scales are small and tightly set; the lukewarm wash the recipe calls for is to take off the slime.
- Skin optionSome cooks scald perch briefly and slip the skin rather than scaling at all. The book assumes scaling, but skinning is faster on a small fish and loses nothing in a boiled preparation.
- "Melted butter"In a Victorian English kitchen this means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter run in a pan. Parsley sauce is that same sauce with chopped parsley; "Dutch sauce" is the period name for an egg-and-butter emulsion in the hollandaise family, usually sharpened with lemon or vinegar.
- YieldOne fish, one person, as stated. Scale up by counting fish rather than weight, and poach them in a single layer so the water temperature does not crash.
- Serving hotBoiled fish cools fast and turns gluey. Warm the dish and the sauce tureen, and drain the fish thoroughly on a cloth so no poaching liquid thins the sauce.
Perch appears in Cassell's with the frank note that its cost is "uncertain, perch being seldom offered for sale" -- a reminder that late nineteenth-century fishmongers dealt overwhelmingly in sea fish, which the railways brought to London in ice, while freshwater species stayed in the hands of anglers and country households. European perch (Perca fluviatilis) was and remains a highly regarded table fish across the Continent, particularly around the Swiss and French lakes, but English cooking treated coarse-fish species with suspicion and gave them the simplest possible handling: boiled whole, garnished with parsley, and rescued by a sauce served separately.