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Tench, Stewed
Take about two pounds of tench; clean, scale, and draw the fish carefully, and remove the gills. Put six ounces of good dripping or butter into a stewpan with a mushroom chopped small, a sliced carrot, a finely-minced onion, a turnip, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, the thin rind of half a lemon, and two or three cloves. Stir these over a clear fire for six or eight minutes, then dredge over them a table-spoonful of flour, and pour in half a pint of stock or water and the strained juice of two lemons. Put in the tench, and let it boil, then add half a tumblerful of claret, a table-spoonful of Worcester sauce, a little salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and let its contents simmer very gently until done enough. Take the fish up, place it on a hot dish, and put it in the oven until the sauce is ready. Strain the sauce, skim carefully, pour it over the fish, and serve immediately with some toasted sippets, the roe fried, a little horse-radish, and lemon. Time to simmer, half an hour. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A Victorian court-bouillon-turned-stew for a muddy freshwater fish. Two things need attention before anything else: the fish is far tougher to prepare than the text implies, and the half-hour simmer will destroy it.
- The simmering timeHalf an hour will reduce a two-pound tench to cotton wool. A whole fish of that size, barely trembling in liquid, is done in 12-15 minutes; the thickest part behind the head should flake and read about 140F. Take it out the moment it does and finish the sauce separately, as the recipe already directs.
- Scaling a tenchTench are notorious for fine scales set in heavy slime, and a knife alone will not shift them. Pour boiling water over the fish for a few seconds, then scrape from tail to head; rinse well afterwards so no mucus carries into the sauce.
- Getting hold of the fishTench is rarely stocked by fishmongers, and in England and Wales it is an offence to sell coarse fish caught by rod and line, so anything on sale will be farmed. Farmed carp or bream of similar size stands up to this braise much as tench does; a whole trout will do but is more delicate.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of stock is 10 fl oz, not 8. "Half a tumblerful" of claret is about 4-5 fl oz — a tumbler of the period held roughly half a pint. Six ounces of dripping is generous by modern taste; three will fry the vegetables perfectly well without a slick to skim later.
- Two lemons plus claretThe strained juice of two lemons in 10 fl oz of liquid is aggressively sharp, and the acid also firms the flesh. Start with one lemon, taste after the sauce has reduced, and add the rest only if it needs it.
- Keeping the fish hot"Put it in the oven" here means a warming oven, not a cooking one. Hold the fish at 200F or below, loosely covered, or it will go on cooking while you strain and skim.
- SippetsTriangles of bread fried in butter or dripping, or simply toasted and cut on the diagonal, arranged round the dish. They are there to soak up a thin sauce.
- The roeRoe is seasonal and may simply not be there, so treat the garnish as optional; note that a male fish carries soft roe (milt), which was fried and served the same way. If it is there, dust it in seasoned flour and fry it in butter for two or three minutes a side.
- YieldTwo or three as written; a 2 lb whole fish yields well under a pound of cooked flesh once head, bones and skin are accounted for.
Tench was a staple of English stew ponds from the medieval period onward — a hardy bottom-feeder that survived in still, low-oxygen water where trout would not, and could be kept alive until needed. Its reputation was mixed: the flesh is sweet but takes on the muddiness of its pond, which is why recipes like this one bury it under lemon, claret, cloves, cayenne and Worcester sauce rather than treating it plainly. The old name "the physician's fish" comes from a traditional belief, repeated by Izaak Walton among others, that the tench's slime healed other fish that rubbed against it. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, sea fish moved cheaply by rail had pushed pond fish to the margins of the English table, which is likely why the entry can only report the cost as "uncertain" — no one was reliably buying it.