Home › The Principles of Cookery › Salad Sauce, Trout In
Salad Sauce, Trout In
Fry two or three trout in the usual way. Lay them on blotting-paper to free them from fat, and put them aside till cold. When they are to be used lay them on a dish, pour some thick salad sauce over them, and garnish the dish with shredded chervil and chives, or otherwise.
A cold fish dish of the Victorian supper table, assuming a cook who already knows how to fry a trout and keeps a jar of salad dressing to hand. Two details need translating: what "the usual way" means, and what "thick salad sauce" was.
- Fry them properly, because they will be eaten coldThe recipe gives no method, but a Victorian fried trout would ordinarily be cleaned, dried, seasoned and floured (or rolled in fine oatmeal), then fried in butter or dripping over a steady moderate heat until the skin is crisp; allow a few minutes a side depending on size. A soggy fried trout is unpleasant hot and worse cold, so the crust matters more here than in a dish served straight from the pan.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper. Victorian blotting-paper was unsized and unprinted, so it was clean enough for food; drain the fish on a rack over paper rather than sitting them in their own fat.
- "Thick salad sauce"Most likely a mayonnaise, or a cooked/boiled dressing thickened with egg yolk and mustard and let down with cream; the recipe does not specify. Either should coat the back of a spoon; a thin vinaigrette will run off the fish and pool on the dish.
- Raw eggIf you make mayonnaise for this, use pasteurised eggs — the sauce is never heated and the dish then sits at room temperature while it is served.
- Cool it, then chill it"Put aside till cold" meant a cold larder. Cool the fish uncovered so the crust does not steam, then refrigerate, and take it out twenty minutes before serving so the fat in the sauce is not stiff.
- Sauce at the last momentDo not dress the fish in advance. An acid sauce sitting on fried skin for an hour softens it completely; pour it over as the dish goes to table.
- The garnishChervil and chives, both fines herbes, suit cold trout well; chervil is faintly aniseed and wilts fast, so shred it just before use. "Or otherwise" leaves room for tarragon, fennel fronds, or a border of cucumber.
- YieldThe recipe gives no sizes; two or three trout of pan size (say 8-10 oz each) will serve two or three as a light main course, more as part of a cold table.
Cold fried fish under a thick egg-based dressing belongs to the Victorian supper and luncheon table, where dishes were expected to be assembled in advance and to stand handsomely on a sideboard. Cassell's uses "salad sauce" loosely for the whole family of thickened dressings he ccheaper boiled or cream-thickened versions that English kitchens preferred han less less oon, which was often explained by their better keeping qualities and by the cost and uneven quality of oil. Trout suited the treatment because it was widely available from rivers. The chervil-and-chives garnish is a nod to French practice; both herbs belong to the classic fines herbes group, and their presence in an English household dictionary shows how far French seasoning had settled into ordinary middle-class cooking.