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Salmon Trout, with Truffles
Take a salmon trout weighing about two pounds, and of firm flesh; scale it, and draw it by the gills, wash and wipe it inwardly. Take four freshly-peeled truffles, chop them, and pound them in a mortar, adding to them the third of their bulk of softened bread-crumbs and the same quantity of butter. Season with salt, pepper, and chopped parsley, and fill the inside of the trout with this preparation. Set the salmon trout on a buttered gratin-dish. Salt, baste with butter, and set in a moderate oven to bake, basting often with butter. After twelve minutes, pour into the dish a small glassful of white wine and a few spoonfuls of melted glaze; boil the liquid, and push the dish back into the oven. In a quarter of an hour the trout should be done enough; place it then on another dish. Dilute the fish stock with a little white wine, let it boil, and thicken it with a piece of kneaded butter. Add two chopped raw truffles, continue boiling for two minutes longer; draw it back, and finish with a piece of fresh butter, the juice of a lemon, and some chopped parsley. Pour this sauce over the salmon trout, and send to table.
A late-Victorian restaurant dish written for a cook who already knows what glaze and kneaded butter are. Almost everything here translates directly; the terms are the obstacle.
- Salmon troutIn British usage this is sea trout — Salmo trutta that has run to sea and taken on pink flesh — not the farmed rainbow trout sold under the same name in some markets. A whole 2 lb fish serves two generously, three at a pinch.
- Draw it by the gillsThe fish is gutted through the gill opening rather than slit along the belly, so the cavity stays closed and holds the stuffing under its own weight. If you have it gutted conventionally, tie or skewer the belly shut once filled.
- A moderate oven350F/175C. The total baking time given is about 27 minutes for a 2 lb fish, which is right; check at the thickest point behind the head for 125-130F, where the flesh has just lost its translucency and parts from the bone.
- GlazeGlace de viande: veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A few spoonfuls means a few spoonfuls of the melted concentrate, not of ordinary stock. Reduced brown stock or a small amount of good demi-glace stands in.
- A small glassful of wineAround 2 fl oz / a quarter cup, the period's wine-glass measure. It goes into the hot dish and is boiled before the fish returns to the oven, which takes the raw edge off it.
- Kneaded butterBeurre manié — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked in bit by bit off a hard boil. For this quantity of liquid, about a teaspoon each is enough; more and the sauce turns pasty.
- TrufflesFour peeled truffles for the stuffing and two more raw in the sauce is a sum no domestic kitchen will meet today. Fresh black winter truffle is the intended article; preserved truffle in its juice is the honest substitute, added with its liquor and never boiled long.
- Finishing the sauceThe final butter and lemon go in off the heat, swirled rather than boiled, or the sauce breaks.
Cassell's compiled its dictionary at the height of the Anglo-French kitchen, when an ambitious English household cook was expected to work from the same vocabulary as a Parisian chef — glaze, gratin-dish, kneaded butter — without much explanation. Salmon trout was the fashionable middle ground between salmon and river trout: fine enough for a dinner-party centrepiece, cheap enough to appear regularly in season, and small enough to cook and serve whole. The truffles mark the dish as a company plate rather than family food, and Victorian cookery books use them freely in stuffings and finishing sauces. The method — bake, deglaze in the same dish, thicken the fish's own liquor and pour it back over — is why the dish still reads as workable rather than antique.