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TENCH, STEWED (another way) (Put them into a bowl and leave)
Put them into a bowl, and leave a little of their liquor upon them to keep them moist. Strain the gravy from the tench, place the fish on a hot dish, and keep it hot. Thicken the gravy with a little flour, and let it boil. Put the oysters and their liquor into it, but on no account allow it to boil after they are added. Pour the sauce over the fish, and serve hot. Garnish with fried sippets. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is the tail end of a longer method — the tench has already been stewed in its liquor before the first line, and the oysters have been separately opened and set aside in a bowl. Read it as the finishing and saucing stage.
- The hinge: never boil the oystersOnce the oysters and their liquor go into the thickened gravy, keep it below a simmer and serve within a minute or two. Boiled oysters shrink and turn to rubber, and the liquor clouds the sauce.
- TenchA freshwater carp relative, muddy-tasting and almost never sold in Britain or the US now. Any firm freshwater fish takes the same treatment — carp, tilapia, or a thick fillet of trout — though cooking times will be shorter than for a whole tench.
- "Time, three-quarters of an hour"That covers the whole dish including the earlier stewing, not this finishing stage. The thickening and saucing here is five minutes' work.
- Thickening the gravyA little flour stirred into strained fish liquor will go lumpy unless it is first worked into softened butter as a beurre manié, or slaked with cold liquid. Boil it a full minute to lose the raw flour taste — this is the only boiling the sauce should get.
- Oyster liquor and saltOyster liquor is salty. Season the sauce only after the liquor is in.
- Fried sippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or dripping until crisp — the Victorian crouton. Cut them from day-old bread and drain them well so they stay crisp against the sauce.
- YieldThree or four as a course in a multi-course dinner. As a modern main it will stretch to two, perhaps three.
Tench appears in Victorian cookery books out of habit rather than enthusiasm: it was a pond fish, stocked in the ornamental and stew ponds of country estates since the Middle Ages, and so came to the kitchen from the garden rather than the fishmonger. It has a reputation for muddiness — cooks were often told to keep the fish in clean water for a day or two before killing it — which explains why almost every recipe drowns it in something assertive, here a flour-thickened gravy and oysters. The oysters are the period's real signature. For much of the nineteenth century, before over-fishing and rising prices put them out of reach, oysters were cheap enough to serve as a bulking agent and a seasoning, folded into steak puddings, stuffings and fish sauces as a matter of course. Books of this kind commonly print several variant methods for the same fish under successive headings, and this page picks up part-way through one of them.