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Perch, Stewed
Take three or four moderate-sized perch. Wash, scale, and empty them, and take out the gills, put them into a stewpan, and barely cover them with weak stock, or water. Put with them a large onion cut into slices, four cloves, a bunch of parsley, a small sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, two pinches of salt, and two pinches of pepper. Simmer gently until the fish is done enough. In order to ascertain when this is the case, press the flesh with the finger, when it should give way to the touch. Lift out the perch, and drain them. Strain the liquid in which they were stewed, thicken it with a little flour and butter, and boil it quickly for a few minutes. Stir into it a wine-glassful of claret, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a tea-spoonful of the essence of anchovy, a small pinch of cayenne, and a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Skin the fish (but preserve the fins), put them upon a hot dish, strain the sauce over them, and put the fins at each side of them; serve very hot. Time to stew the perch, fifteen or twenty minutes, according to size. Probable cost, uncertain, perch being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A gentle court-bouillon poach finished with a sharp, dark Victorian sauce. Most of the updating needed here is in the timing and in three flavourings that have since changed shelf.
- The hinge: poach, do not boilThe liquid should barely tremble; a rolling boil breaks perch flesh apart and clouds the stock you are about to turn into sauce. The finger test given is sound — the flesh yields and the flake separates from the backbone at about 145F at the thickest point.
- Fifteen to twenty minutes is longThe book itself allows "according to size", and the "moderate-sized" fish it calls for will often be done sooner: whole perch of 8-12 oz in about 8-10 minutes, skinless fillets in 4-5. Overcooked perch goes cottony rather than rubbery, but it is just as unwelcome.
- Handling perchPerch scales cling hard and the dorsal fin is genuinely spiny — cut the fin out with shears before scaling, and work from tail to head. Skinning after poaching, as directed, is far easier than skinning raw.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Any dry red stands in for claret; the wine is there for colour and acidity as much as flavour, and it should boil a minute or two to lose its raw edge.
- Essence of anchovyA thin, salty anchovy extract sold by the bottle. A teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two fillets mashed to nothing, gives the same effect. Salt the sauce only after it goes in.
- Mushroom ketchupStill made in Britain and worth seeking out — a thin, black, intensely savoury liquid, nothing like tomato ketchup. Failing that, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or a teaspoon of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquor covers the ground.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" means beurre manié: equal weights kneaded together, about 2 teaspoons of each for a cup of strained liquid, whisked in off the heat and then boiled to cook out the flour.
- The finsArranging the fins beside the skinned fish was a point of Victorian presentation and can be skipped without loss.
- Substitutes and yieldServes two or three as written. European perch is scarce commercially; yellow perch, walleye, or any firm white freshwater fish behaves the same way in a poach, and sea bass or bream will do.
The most telling line in this entry is the costing: "Probable cost, uncertain, perch being seldom offered for sale." Perch was an angler's fish rather than a fishmonger's one, and Cassell's includes it for the household that had a river or a pond rather than a market — the same readership that had entries for pike, tench and gudgeon. Izaak Walton devoted a chapter to the perch in The Compleat Angler, calling it a bold biting fish, and freshwater fish cookery kept a place in English books long after sea fish had taken over the towns by rail. The sauce is pure late-Victorian store-cupboard: claret, mushroom ketchup, anchovy essence and cayenne, the same quartet that turns up behind hashes, devilled bones and steak sauces of the period, all of it there to give a mild river fish the dark savoury weight the age preferred.