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Tench, Stewed, with Poulette Sauce
Take about two pounds of tench; draw and clean the fish carefully, and remove the grills. Put it into boiling water for three minutes, then remove the scales, and cut the fish into convenient-sized pieces. Mix two ounces of butter and one ounce and a half of flour over a clear fire until quite smooth. Add as much common French wine or cider as will cover the fish, and let it boil for eight or ten minutes. Put with it a small bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, a moderate-sized onion, and a little pepper and salt. Add the fish, and let it stew gently over a slow fire until done enough, Strain the sauce, and mix part of it with the well-beaten yolks of three eggs in a basin, and pour this to the remainder. Stir it over a gentle fire until it is very hot without boiling, and add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Arrange the slices of tench upon a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve very hot. The dish may be garnished with the fried roe, toasted sippets, and a little parsley and horse-radish. Time to simmer the fish, about twenty minutes. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A freshwater fish cooked in a wine or cider velouté and finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens in the last two minutes.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce is held below a simmer — around 180F is the working limit. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into grains that no amount of whisking will bring back. Tempering the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce first, as written, is not optional.
- Sourcing tenchTench is a European pond fish, rarely sold commercially now and largely an angler's catch. Carp, bream or another firm freshwater fish stands in; at a fishmonger, small whole trout or a thick piece of firm white fish will take the sauce, though the texture is leaner than tench.
- "Grills" means gillsA period spelling, not an instruction about grilling. They come out because they hold blood and go bitter in a stew.
- The three-minute blanchTench is famously slimy and its scales are small and set deep in the skin. Dipping the fish in boiling water loosens both, which is why the scaling comes after the blanch rather than before — an order that looks wrong until you have handled one.
- "Common French wine or cider"An everyday table wine -- nothing oaked or sweet -- or a dry still cider. The recipe does not say which colour of wine, though the pale sauce points to white. The quantity is governed by the pan: enough to cover the fish.
- The roux is loose on purposeTwo ounces butter to one and a half ounces flour, then thinned with the whole cooking liquid, gives a sauce that barely coats. The recipe adds no reduction step; what body it gains comes from the egg yolks.
- Twenty minutes is longThat figure probably assumes fairly thick pieces held at a bare tremble. Cut small, most freshwater fish is done in 8 to 12 minutes -- the flesh should just part at the bone. Judge by the fish, not the clock.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, set around the edge of the dish. They exist to soak up the sauce and to give the plate some crispness.
- YieldTwo or three as a main course, as stated, and rather more as a first course. The fried roe garnish depends entirely on whether the fish came with one.
Sauce poulette is a classic French finish — a velouté slackened with the cooking liquor and bound with egg yolks, sharpened with parsley and usually a little lemon — and it is traditionally associated with tripe, mussels and frogs' legs as much as with fish. Its appearance over tench in a late-Victorian English dictionary of cookery reflects the steady borrowing of French sauce technique into British domestic kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, the period in which Cassell's was compiled. Tench itself was a pond fish rather than a market fish: bred in the still water of estate and monastery ponds, valued because it survived transport alive, and long carrying the folk name "the doctor fish" from the belief that other fish rubbed against its slime to heal themselves. That slime, and the muddy flavour that can come with pond-raised fish, is the reason old recipes are so insistent about the scalding and the aromatics — parsley, thyme, bay, onion and a wine or cider braise are all doing corrective work as well as flavouring.