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Trout, Baked
Clean and dry the fish, and season them inside and out with a little salt and cayenne and a pinch of powdered mace if liked. Put them in a baking-dish, and lay little pieces of butter here and there upon them. Baste occasionally with the liquor that collects in the pan. Baked trout may be served hot or cold. If served hot, the fish gravy should be mixed with a little good melted butter, and sent to table in a tureen. When it is a convenience, several trout may be baked together. They should be put into the dish in layers, and a little seasoning, chopped parsley, and butter should be placed between each layer. The trout are done enough when the flesh leaves the bone easily.
A plain baked trout with no oven setting and no timing given, which is typical of Cassell's — the doneness test at the end is the whole instruction. A few notes fill the gaps.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern choice; whole trout of 8-10 oz take roughly 18-25 minutes, a 1 lb fish nearer 30. The flesh should part from the backbone with light pressure, which is the test the original gives.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn Victorian usage melted butter means a thin white sauce — butter worked into flour and thinned with water or fish stock, not simply butter liquefied. Mixing the pan juices into plain molten butter will split; a light roux-based sauce will carry them.
- MacePowdered mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, milder and more floral. A pinch is genuinely a pinch here; it overwhelms river fish quickly. Nutmeg at half the quantity substitutes tolerably.
- Basting and drying outTrout is lean and the pan yields little liquor. Cover loosely with buttered paper or foil for the first two-thirds of the time, then uncover to finish, rather than relying on basting alone.
- The layered versionStacking several fish with parsley and butter between makes the lower layers steam while the top bakes. Expect longer cooking overall and check the bottom fish, not the top one, for doneness.
- Served coldCold baked trout was a breakfast and supper dish. Let it cool in the dish so the set juices hold it moist, and eat it within a day; refrigerate rather than leaving it in a cool larder as the book assumes.
- YieldOne trout of 8-12 oz per person as a main course, half that if it is one course among several.
Cassell's belongs to the era when trout were often taken by rod as well as bought from a shop — river and lake fish, cooked simply and often the same day they were caught. The book bothers with neither weights nor a clock, as it omits both routinely across many recipes. The instruction that several may be baked together "when it is a convenience" may reflect a household where the catch arrived in unpredictable numbers. Serving the fish cold with its own set jelly was standard practice for cold collations and breakfast sideboards in late Victorian homes, and the accompanying "melted butter" — a flour-thickened sauce despite the name — was the default English fish sauce for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before French-style veloutés and hollandaise displaced it in ambitious kitchens.