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Salmon Trout, Stuffed and Baked
Take a good-sized trout, weighing two to three pounds. Clean and scale it, handling it as little as possible, and fill it with fish forcemeat. Put it into a baking-dish, and pour underneath and round it a marinade, made with a spoonful or two of vinegar boiled with vegetables and spices to flavour it; lay a good slice of butter broken into little pieces here and there on the fish, and bake in a moderate oven. Baste frequently with the marinade. When the fish is done enough keep it hot a few minutes. Strain the liquor in the dish, add some stock to it to make the quantity of sauce required, thicken this with flour and butter, season with a little anchovy, the squeeze of a lemon, and a pinch of cayenne. Skin the trout, strain the sauce over it, and serve. The forcemeat may be made as follows. Take two ounces of finely-shredded suet and two ounces of grated bread-crumbs; mix with these a tea-spoonful each of parsley, thyme, and marjoram, and add a large pinch of salt, a pinch each of powdered mace, pepper, and lemon-rind. Bind the forcemeat together with the yolk of an egg, and it will be ready for use. Time to bake the trout, twenty to thirty-five minutes, according to size. Sufficient for two or three persons. Probable cost, uncertain, according to season.
A straightforward baked whole fish with a suet stuffing and a pan sauce; the Victorian vocabulary hides very little difficulty. A few terms and one timing need translating.
- What a salmon trout isIn British usage of the period this means sea trout — Salmo trutta that has run to sea and taken on pink flesh — not a hybrid or a farmed rainbow. A whole sea trout, arctic char, or a small whole salmon of the same weight all behave the same way here.
- Moderate ovenUsually rendered as about 350F / 175C. At that heat a 2-3 lb whole fish will take the 20-35 minutes the recipe gives, according to size; check at 20 minutes, remembering that the stuffing slows the centre. Because the forcemeat is bound with raw egg yolk, cook until the stuffing at the centre is hot through rather than pulling the fish early.
- The marinade is thin on purpose"A spoonful or two of vinegar boiled with vegetables and spices" means a small quantity of quick court-bouillon — vinegar plus water, onion, carrot, bay, peppercorns, simmered ten minutes and strained. Pour in enough to come a third of the way up the fish, no more, or you poach rather than bake and the sauce ends up weak.
- Suet in the forcemeatShredded beef suet, sold ready-shredded in Britain and available frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. Cold grated butter is the usual substitute; it melts faster, so the stuffing will be looser but no worse. Two ounces each of suet and crumbs is roughly 55 g each, and one egg yolk binds it.
- Anchovy for seasoning"A little anchovy" most likely means one of the bottled anchovy essences or sauces common in Victorian kitchens; a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two fillets mashed to nothing, gives the same salty depth. Add it off the boil and taste before salting the sauce further.
- Thickening with flour and butterEqual weights of soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste — beurre manié — whisked into the strained, simmering liquor in small pieces. About 15 g of each per 250 ml of sauce. Let it bubble a minute or two to cook out the raw flour.
- Skinning the fishDo this while the trout is still hot and resting; the skin lifts away in sheets from a properly cooked sea trout and clings once cool. Work along the backbone from head to tail with a palette knife, then flip and repeat.
- YieldAs stated, two or three as a main course. With the stuffing and a starch alongside it will stretch to four modest portions.
The note that the cost is "uncertain, according to season" reflects a market where wild salmon and its cousins arrived in seasonal gluts and then vanished, rather than sitting at a steady farmed price as they do now. The treatment itself is thoroughly of its time: a whole fish baked over an aromatic vinegar liquor, the liquor then extended with stock and turned into the sauce, so that nothing is wasted and one dish produces its own accompaniment. A forcemeat of suet, crumbs and dried herbs bound with egg yolk was a common English stuffing of the nineteenth-century kitchen, used with equal readiness in a fowl, a shoulder of veal or a fish, and anchovy seasoning at the end was a familiar way of giving a pale sauce savour -- the same instinct that put anchovy essence into steak sauces, potted meats and Worcestershire-style bottled condiments.