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TENCH, STEWED (another way) (Take three or four)
Take three or four moderate-sized tench; clean, scale, and draw them, and cut them into convenient-sized pieces. Put them in a stewpan with three or four large mushrooms chopped small, a dozen button onions, a blade of mace, two anchovies, a shallot, a tea-spoonful of mixed parsley, a pinch of thyme, and a little pepper and salt. Pour over them as much nicely-flavoured stock as will cover them, add a glassful of port or claret, and simmer the fish gently for half an hour. Open a dozen oysters, beard them, and preserve their liquor; dip them for an instant into cold water; put them into a saucepan for a few minutes with the liquor, and let them heat gently for three or four minutes, till they look plump, then add them to the other ingredients. Dish the tench, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A Victorian freshwater fish stew that assumes a cook with a river fish, a stockpot on the go, and oysters cheap enough to use as a garnish. Two things need attention: the cooking time and the fish itself.
- The half-hour simmerPieces of tench are cooked through in 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer. Thirty minutes leaves the flesh cottony and collapsing off the bone. Cook the fish until it just flakes, lift it out, and reduce the liquor separately if the sauce needs body.
- Sourcing tenchTench is a European carp-family fish, almost never sold commercially now and in Britain generally treated as a coarse fish to be returned to the water. Carp, bream, grey mullet or any firm, mild freshwater fish stands in; the recipe is really a method for a fish in red wine.
- Cleaning itTench is famously slimy and its scales are small and embedded. The old practice is to pour boiling water over the fish briefly, then scrape; that loosens both slime and scales in a way dry scaling will not.
- A glassfulA wine glass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the term is loose. Something between a quarter and a half cup of port or claret is a reasonable reading for this quantity of fish and stock.
- Button onions and a blade of maceButton onions are small whole pickling onions, about an inch across; peeled pearl onions work. A blade of mace is one strip of the lacy aril around a nutmeg, worth about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, and should be fished out before serving.
- The anchoviesTwo salted anchovy fillets, mashed, dissolve into the stock and act as the seasoning backbone rather than reading as fish. Salt at the end, not the start, since the anchovies and the stock both bring their own.
- The oystersThree or four minutes is already at the limit. Warm them in their strained liquor only until the edges ruffle and they plump, a minute or two, then add them off the heat. Boiled oysters turn to rubber. The recipe does not say why the oysters are dipped in cold water; a rinse for grit is the likeliest explanation, and straining the liquor through muslin would do the same job without diluting flavour.
- YieldThree or four moderate tench with a dozen oysters serves four to six as a main course, with bread or plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Tench was a standard English pond fish for centuries, farmed in monastic and manorial stews alongside carp and bream because it survives in warm, low-oxygen water and travels alive. It carried the folk name "the doctor fish", from an old and undocumented belief that other fish rubbed against its slime to heal their wounds. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the 1870s the fish was already a country and angler's dish rather than a market one, and the book gives it several treatments. The red wine, anchovy, mace and oyster combination is pure mid-Victorian fish cookery, descended from the older English habit of enriching freshwater fish, which is mild and can taste of the pond, with strongly savoury sea flavours.