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TROUT (a I'Aurore)
Take two moderate-sized trout, empty them, remove the gills and fins, scrape off the scales, then wash carefully, and wipe them dry. Put into the kettle as much water as will cover the fish, and with each quart put a table-spoonful of salt and a table-spoonful of vinegar. Put the trout into the water when it is boiling, and boil gently: when the eyes start the fish are done. Lift them out carefully, drain them, place them in a hot dish, and cover entirely with a sauce prepared as follows. Beat the yolks of three eggs thoroughly, and mix with them a quarter of a pint of white sauce, an ounce of grated Parmesan, a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar, and a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence. Stir the sauce over a gentle fire until it begins to thicken; it is then ready. Boil two eggs till hard, mince them finely, mix a table-spoonful of grated Parmesan with them, and sprinkle the mixture over the fish. Put them in the oven for about a quarter of an hour till hot through, brown the surface with a salamander or red-hot shovel, then pour a little shrimp, tomato, or lobster sauce round the fish, and serve them very hot. Time, trout weighing about a pound, ten or twelve minutes to boil, large trout, twenty minutes. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian two-stage fish dish: trout poached in a salt-and-vinegar court bouillon, masked with an egg-and-Parmesan sauce, then glazed. Most of the updating needed concerns the sauce, which will curdle if treated as an ordinary cooked sauce.
- The hinge: the yolk sauce must not boilThree yolks beaten into 5 fl oz of white sauce is a liaison, not a roux sauce. Stir it over the gentlest heat, or in a bowl over barely simmering water, and pull it the moment it coats the spoon — a bare simmer will scramble it into grains.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. "White sauce" here is a thin béchamel: 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 5 fl oz milk, cooked out for a few minutes.
- Kettle and salamanderThe "kettle" is a fish kettle or any wide, shallow pan the fish can lie flat in. A salamander was an iron plate heated in the fire and held over food to brown it; the modern equivalent is an overhead broiler or a blowtorch.
- Doneness, and the ten to twelve minutes"When the eyes start" — the eyes turn opaque and protrude — is a sound old cue, but check it as well by seeing whether the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone. A 1 lb trout in liquid held just below a simmer is usually done in 6–8 minutes, rather less than the ten or twelve given here.
- The reheating stepFifteen minutes in the oven after poaching will dry the fish out. Five to eight minutes is enough to heat the sauce through and set the cheese crust, then brown under the broiler.
- Chilli vinegar and anchovy essenceChilli vinegar was vinegar steeped with hot peppers; a teaspoon of sherry vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce is close. Anchovy essence was a thin bottled extract — use half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a teaspoon of colatura, and taste before adding more salt.
- Salt in the poaching waterA tablespoon of salt per quart is roughly a 2 percent brine, somewhat saltier than many modern court bouillons. Half that will still season the flesh and firm it without pushing the finished dish salty once Parmesan and anchovy go on.
- YieldTwo trout of about a pound each, as stated, feed three or four with the sauces. Have the shrimp, tomato or lobster sauce hot and ready before the fish comes out of the oven.
The name points to the colour: sauce aurore — dawn — is classically a white sauce tinted rose with tomato, and dishes labelled à l'aurore were generally expected to arrive golden-pink rather than pale. This version gets its warmth from egg yolks, Parmesan and the ring of shrimp, tomato or lobster sauce poured round the dish, which is characteristic of later nineteenth-century English cookery books borrowing French names for a treatment assembled from British larder staples: bottled anchovy essence, chilli vinegar, a made white sauce. Acid in the poaching water is used to firm the flesh; in the French truite au bleu it also reacts with the slime coat of a very fresh, unwashed trout to give it a bluish cast, though this recipe's washing and scaling would rule that out. The entry's "probable cost, uncertain" may reflect the variable price of trout, which was often caught or given rather than bought.