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TROUT (a la Genevese)
Take two moderate-sized trout, clean carefully, and wipe them dry. Dissolve a quarter of a pound of fresh butter in a stewpan, and put with it a small onion stuck with a clove, a small bunch of parsley, and a sprig of thyme, a salt-spoonful of salt, and half a salt-spoonful of white pepper. Mix thoroughly, and add half a pint of sherry or Madeira. Simmer the trout very gently till the eyes start. Pour off the liquor, leaving only sufficient to keep the fish moist, thicken with flour and butter, let it boil up, then serve the fish on a hot dish with part of the sauce poured over it and the rest in a tureen. If this dish is considered too extravagant, the fish may be boiled in stock flavoured with sherry, then thickened with flour and butter, and flavoured with the strained juice of a lemon, a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence, and a little salt and cayenne. Time, ten minutes or more, according to size. Probable cost, very uncertain. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A wine-braised trout that works as written, provided the wine never comes to a real boil and the fish comes out the moment it is done. Two conversions matter: this is a British book, so the pint is 20 fl oz.
- Doneness, not time"Till the eyes start" means the eye has turned opaque white and begun to protrude — the traditional cue for a whole poached fish. In practice the flesh at the thickest point should just part from the bone; 8-12 minutes for a trout of about 12 oz. The stated "ten minutes or more" is generous for anything smaller.
- Half a pint of sherryAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Use a dry amontillado or a dry Madeira such as Sercial; a cream sherry will make the sauce cloying.
- Butter and salt-spoonsA quarter pound is 4 oz / 115 g — a large amount, and deliberately so, since it is the body of the sauce. A salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning here is about ¼ tsp salt and a scant ⅛ tsp white pepper.
- Keep it at a bare trembleThe hinge of the dish. Wine held at a rolling boil around a delicate fish turns harsh and drives the butter out of suspension. Barely moving liquid, lid ajar.
- Thickening with flour and butterThis is beurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the simmering liquor in small pieces. Start with about 2 tsp of each for the reduced sauce and let it boil up once to lose the raw flour taste.
- Anchovy essenceIn the economical version, anchovy essence was a bottled seasoning sold by the likes of Burgess. A teaspoon of good anchovy paste, or two mashed salted anchovy fillets, gives the same salty depth.
- The onion stuck with a cloveStandard period shorthand for an oignon clouté. Remove the onion, herbs and clove before thickening — they are aromatics, not garnish.
- Fish and yieldTwo whole trout of 10-12 oz each, gutted, heads on if you want the eye cue. Serves two generously or three modestly, as the original says.
Sauce g ote as "Genevese" — is one of the older classical fish sauces, generally traced to the cooking of Lake Geneva and its trout and char, though French practice by the nineteenth century had largely moved it to red wine, a mirepoix and fish stock, and cookery writers have long argued over whether the name should properly be g oise, after Genoa. Cassell's gives the plainer English drawing-room version: white wine or Madeira, butter, and a flour-and-butter liaison, with no stock-making at all. What is most characteristic of the book is the second half of the entry. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was written for households that kept a cook but watched the bills, and it habitually prints a cheaper route beside the expensive one — here, boiling the fish in stock rather than sacrificing half a pint of sherry to the pan, with lemon and anchovy essence standing in for the depth the wine would have given. The candid "probable cost, very uncertain" suggests a period when the price of trout moved with the season.