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Tench, Boiled
Scale, draw, and clean the fish carefully, and remove the gills. Take care of the melt or roe. Lift the backbone, and rub in a little salt; then lay the tench in cold salted water for an hour or more, and afterwards rinse it in fresh water. Put it into a saucepan with as much boiling salted water as will cover it, and let it simmer till done enough. Dish the fish on a napkin, garnish with curled parsley and slices of lemon, and send melted butter or maitre d'hotel sauce to table in a tureen. Time to boil, fifteen to twenty minutes for a moderate-sized tench. Probable cost, uncertain, tench being seldom offered for sale.
A plain court-bouillon treatment for a muddy-tasting river fish, written when tench came from a pond rather than a shop. The hour in salted water is the part that matters most.
- The soak is not optionalTench and other still-water fish carry a distinctly earthy, weedy flavour in the flesh and skin. The long salted soak and the rinse draw much of it out; skipping it gives you a fish that tastes of the pond bottom.
- "Melt" means miltThe soft roe of the male fish, spelled variously melt, milt or milk in Victorian books. The recipe says only to "take care of" it; in period practice soft and hard roe alike were commonly cooked and served with the fish, though this text does not say how.
- "Lift the backbone"Most likely an instruction to loosen the spine from inside the belly cavity so salt can reach the thickest flesh along the bone. It probably does not mean fillet the fish, since the tench is dished whole.
- Scaling a tenchThe scales are small and set in a heavy layer of slime, which makes ordinary scraping frustrating. Pouring boiling water over the fish for a few seconds, then rubbing with coarse salt and a cloth, loosens both slime and scales.
- Simmer, do not boil"As much boiling salted water as will cover it" then a bare simmer — the surface should barely tremble. A rolling boil splits the skin and shreds the flesh. Fifteen to twenty minutes is what the recipe allows for what it calls a "moderate-sized" fish, without stating a weight; test at the thickest point behind the head, where the flesh should just part from the bone.
- "Melted butter"Not simply butter warmed through. In this period melted butter is a thin white sauce: butter worked with a little flour and water or fish stock and brought to the boil. Maitre d'hotel sauce is the same thing finished with chopped parsley and lemon juice.
- The napkinBoiled fish was dished on a folded linen napkin to absorb the water that continues to drain from it. A rack over a warmed platter does the same job without the laundry.
- SourcingThe note about cost still holds: tench is a coarse fish in Britain, not sold for the table, though it is eaten in parts of central and eastern Europe. Carp, bream or any firm freshwater fish of similar size takes the same treatment, and benefits equally from the soak.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a single moderate-sized tench is a dish for two, or three as part of a longer meal.
Tench (Tinca tinca) was a stock pond fish across medieval and early modern Europe, valued less for flavour than for the fact that it survived being kept alive in stews and tubs until wanted — useful on the many fast days when meat was forbidden. It was long known as the "doctor fish," from the old belief that other fish rubbed against its slimy skin to cure their ailments, a piece of folklore repeated by Izaak Walton and traditionally cited rather than demonstrated. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s the fish was seldom offered for sale, which is why the entry can give a cooking time but not a price: it belonged to the angler and the country house pond, not the fishmonger's slab. The recipe survives in the dictionary for completeness, alongside carp and bream, as part of a freshwater repertoire that British cooking had largely abandoned in favour of sea fish brought inland by rail.