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TROUT, BAKED (another way)
Wash, empty, and dry three or four small trout, split them open, and remove the bones. Lay three or four thin slices of fat bacon at the bottom of a baking-dish, lay the trout upon these, skin uppermost, and sprinkle a little pepper, salt, grated nutmeg, and chopped parsley over them. Bake in a quick oven, and serve very hot. Time to bake, half an hour. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A simple bacon-fat bake that needs only two adjustments: a real oven number and a much shorter time.
- Timing is the hingeHalf an hour is likely to overcook small boned trout. Butterflied fish of this size are generally done in 10-15 minutes at high heat, when the flesh is opaque and flakes at the thickest part behind the head.
- "Quick oven"Read this as a hot oven, roughly 400-450F (200-230C); the term is not precise. The high heat helps render the bacon underneath and keeps the fish from stewing in its own liquid.
- Fat baconThe recipe wants a fatty cut, streaky belly sliced thin, not lean rashers. Its job is to grease the dish and baste the fish from below; modern water-added bacon will release liquid instead. Unsmoked or lightly smoked may suit the dish better, though the recipe does not specify.
- Split and bonedButterfly the trout: cut along the belly, open it flat, and lift out the backbone with the rib bones attached, leaving the two fillets joined at the skin. The fish then lies skin-up in a single layer, which is what the instruction "skin uppermost" means.
- NutmegGrated nutmeg with fish is a survival of older English seasoning practice. Use it sparingly, a few rasps for the whole dish, or it dominates the parsley.
- Dish and yieldA shallow gratin dish or quarter-sheet pan, large enough that the fish are not overlapping. As written this serves three or four as a main course with bread and butter.
- Serving"Serve very hot" is meant literally with a bacon-fat dish, since the fat sets as it cools. Bring it to the table in the baking dish, with lemon if you like.
Cassell's gives several trout recipes. Baking a split fish on slices of fat bacon is an old economy of the technique: before domestic ovens held steady heat, the bacon supplied both the greased surface and the basting fat, and its salt seasoned the flesh from below. The grated nutmeg is the older note here — spicing fish with nutmeg and mace was standard in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and it lingers in nineteenth-century compendia like this one long after it had faded from fashionable French-influenced cooking.