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Roach, Fried
Wash the fish, dry them thoroughly with a soft cloth, dredge flour lightly over them, and fry them in hot fat till the flesh leaves the bone easily. Drain, and serve them on a hot dish, garnished with parsley. Send anchovy sauce to table with them. Time to fry, ten minutes. Sufficient, three or four for a dish. Probable cost, uncertain, roach being seldom sold.
A plain shallow-fry for a small, bony freshwater fish. The original assumes you caught it yourself and that someone else has already gutted and scaled it.
- Prepare the fish firstThe recipe begins at "wash" because cleaning was taken as read. Scale the roach (they are firmly scaled), gut them, and trim the fins; heads may stay on. Rinse and dry hard — wet skin will not take flour and will spit in the fat.
- Fat and heat"Hot fat" is not specified further; dripping, lard or clarified butter would all fit the period, and the book does not say whether the pan is shallow or deep. As a modern equivalent, the fat should be hot enough that the flour coating sets and colours within the first minute — roughly 350-375F. Cold fat gives grey, greasy skin.
- Ten minutes is for a whole fishThat timing suits a whole roach of 6-8 inches, turned once. Fillets or very small fish need three to four minutes total. The stated test — flesh leaving the bone easily — is still the right one.
- The bonesRoach are notoriously full of fine intermuscular bones. Scoring the flanks at close intervals before flouring is one way to cut through the small bones, though the recipe itself does not mention it.
- Anchovy sauceA period standby: a white or butter sauce sharpened with anchovy essence, served in a boat alongside. Modern bottled anchovy sauce is a different, darker condiment; a plain butter sauce with mashed anchovy fillet or a little paste is closer to what was meant.
- YieldThree or four fish "for a dish" serves two as a light course, given how little flesh a roach carries.
- SourcingThe note that roach are "seldom sold" still holds. In Britain roach are a coarse fish, not a market fish, and are covered by angling licences, close seasons and in many waters catch-and-release rules. Check the local regulations before treating one as supper; small perch, dace or whole sardines cook the same way.
Roach (Rutilus rutilus) belongs to the carp family and was for centuries the everyday quarry of English river anglers rather than a fishmonger's stock — hence the shrug about the price. Nineteenth-century cookery books carried short entries like this one not because households bought such fish but because sporting men brought them home, and the kitchen needed some instruction for a small, bony, muddy-tasting freshwater catch. The remedies are the standard ones of the period: thorough drying, a dusting of flour, hot fat, and a strongly savoury sauce to carry a fish that has little flavour of its own. Anchovy sauce turns up beside fried freshwater fish in Victorian books for exactly that reason. Roach were also long held, traditionally, to be at their best in autumn and winter, when the flesh firms up after spawning.