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Tench, Fried
Scale, draw, remove the gills, and clean the fish with great care. Dry them well, and flour them, then put them into boiling fat, and when they are brown on one side turn them upon the other. Drain them on soft paper before the fire, and serve on a hot dish. Garnish with crisped parsley, and send a little sauce to table with them in a tureen. Time to fry, six to twelve minutes, according to size.
A plain shallow-fry that assumes you know how to handle a tench, which is the part most modern cooks will not. The fish itself is the difficulty, not the method.
- The hinge: getting the scales offTench are notoriously slimy and their small scales are set fast in the skin. One traditional handling is to dip the fish briefly in very hot water, then scrape from tail to head; without that, "scale, draw" is a long and frustrating job. Rinse the loosened slime off thoroughly afterwards.
- Sourcing a tenchTench is a coarse fish rarely sold commercially in Britain or the US, and in many places angled tench must be returned to the water. Carp, bream, perch or any firm freshwater panfish takes this treatment identically; small whole fish of about 3/4 to 1 lb are the right size.
- "Boiling fat"Meaning fat hot enough to shimmer and bubble at the edge of the fish, roughly 350-375F. Shallow fat about half the depth of the fish is enough for a whole small fish; the recipe's turn-once instruction assumes shallow frying, not immersion.
- Flour themDry the fish very well and flour just before it goes in the pan, or the coating turns to paste. Seasoned flour is the norm now; the original leaves salt and pepper unstated.
- "Drain on soft paper before the fire"Soft paper is unglazed kitchen paper; the fire is simply a warm place. A rack over a low oven at 200F does the same and keeps the crust from steaming.
- Six to twelve minutesTotal, both sides, for whole fish of a few ounces up to about a pound. Judge by the flesh at the thickest point beside the backbone: opaque and parting from the bone. Larger fish are better slashed to the bone on each side so the centre cooks in the same time as the crust colours.
- The sauce sent to tableCassell's expects the sauce sent separately, in a tureen; for fried freshwater fish that might be melted butter with anchovy, or a plain caper or parsley sauce. Anything sharp works better than anything rich, since tench and carp are soft-flavoured.
- Crisped parsleyWhole sprigs, dried completely, dropped into the same fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing. They scorch almost immediately, so do them after the fish and lift them out fast.
- YieldOne small tench per person; two if they are very small. A pound fish will serve two as a first course.
Tench (Tinca tinca) was a standard pond fish across medieval and early modern Europe, farmed alongside carp in the stew ponds of monasteries and great houses because both tolerate warm, still, low-oxygen water and travel alive. Its old nickname, the "doctor fish", comes from a long-standing belief that its slime healed the wounds of other fish, a notion repeated by Izaak Walton and generally treated as folklore. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, tench had slipped out of the fishmonger's trade and into the angler's basket, and the book gives it only a brisk half-paragraph. The insistence here on cleaning "with great care" and drying well reflects the fish's reputation for muddiness han the the flesh of the pond.