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Tench, Stewed, with Wine
Clean the fish, lay them in a saucepan, add three-quarters of a pint of stock, and a quarter of a pint of sherry, and boil gently for forty minutes. Mix a tea-spoonful of flour smoothly with a spoonful of cold stock; strain half a pint of the stock the fish was cooked in into a fresh saucepan, add the flour to this, and stir them over the fire for three or four minutes until the sauce thickens; season with pepper and salt. Dish the tench on a very hot dish, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A plain wine-poached freshwater fish with a flour-thickened cooking liquor. The one thing to change is the cooking time.
- Forty minutes is far too longTench of eating size are small, and forty minutes of simmering reduces the flesh to cotton. Poach whole fish of about 1 lb for 10-15 minutes, or until the flesh at the backbone loses its translucency; fillets need 5-6 minutes at a bare simmer.
- Quantities in modern measureThree-quarters of an imperial pint of stock is about 1 3/4 cups; a quarter pint of sherry is a scant 2/3 cup. The half pint strained off for the sauce is about 1 1/4 cups. Recipes of this date assume the 20 fl oz imperial pint, not the American 16.
- "A spoonful" of cold stockUnspecified, and it only has to slake a teaspoon of flour. A tablespoon is right; the mixture should pour, not clump.
- The sauce is thin by designOne teaspoon of flour to 1 1/4 cups of liquid gives barely more than a lightly bound broth. If you want a sauce that coats, use 2-3 teaspoons of flour or finish with a knob of cold butter whisked in off the heat.
- SherryUse a dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry. Cooking sherry sold with added salt will make the reduced sauce aggressively salty, so season only at the end.
- Getting tench, and its reputationTench is rarely sold commercially and, as a coarse fish, is subject in some places to close seasons, size limits or restrictions on sale; check local rules before taking one. Carp, bream or any firm freshwater fish works, though tench in particular has a reputation for a muddy taste — soaking in cold salted or acidulated water for a few hours before cooking is the traditional remedy, as is thorough scaling.
- YieldTwo small tench, or roughly 1 1/2 lb of fish, serve two as a main course. The dish must go out hot: a thin flour sauce on a cool plate is unappealing, so warm the platter properly as the original insists.
Tench (Tinca tinca) belonged to the older European tradition of eating pond fish, kept alive in stew ponds attached to monasteries, manors and inns so that fresh fish was available on fast days when sea fish could not be had inland. It is a slow, mud-loving fish, which is why a good many historical recipes treat it firmly — long simmering, wine, strong seasoning — and why it was commonly rated below trout or perch. It was also known for centuries as the "doctor fish," from the traditional and undocumented belief that other fish rubbed against its slime to heal themselves. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, rail-borne sea fish had reached most British towns and coarse freshwater fish were sliding out of the kitchen and into the angler's keep net; entries like this one preserve a dictionary's obligation to cover a fish that its readers were already unlikely to cook.