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Trout, Boiled
Clean, empty, and dry the fish, and put them into fast-boiling water, to each quart of which a dessert-spoonful of salt and a dessert-spoonful of vinegar have been added. Remove the scum as it rises, and boil the fish until the eyes start. Drain the trout, and lift them out carefully not to break the skin, serve on a hot napkin, and garnish with parsley or lemon. Send melted butter, shrimp sauce, anchovy sauce, or Dutch sauce to table in a tureen. The great angler, Izaak Walton, recommends that trout should be boiled in a mixture of beer, vinegar, and water, in which the rind of a lemon, and a little rosemary, thyme, winter savory, and horse-radish has been boiled. Time, a trout weighing one pound, from ten to twelve minutes' boiling; two pounds, fifteen minutes; three pounds, twenty minutes.
A plain court-bouillon poach dressed up with a choice of rich sauces. The one change worth making is the heat: bring the water to the boil, then hold it just below a simmer once the fish goes in.
- Do not actually boil itA rolling boil tears the skin and squeezes the flesh of a fish this delicate. Drop the trout into boiling water, take the pan straight down to a bare shiver (about 180F), and hold it there for the stated time.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessert spoon is two teaspoons, so a quart of water takes 2 tsp salt and 2 tsp vinegar. That is a light seasoning by modern standards; a tablespoon of salt per quart gives a better-flavoured fish.
- "Until the eyes start"The eye turning opaque white and bulging is a genuine doneness cue, but the more reliable test is the flesh at the thickest part of the back parting cleanly from the backbone. If you use an instant-read thermometer, standard food-safety guidance is 145F at the thickest part; many cooks pull freshwater fish earlier, nearer 135-140F, accepting that this is below the recommended figure.
- The timingsTen to twelve minutes for a 1 lb fish is generous for a modern poach at sub-simmer heat; start checking a whole 1 lb trout at eight minutes. Two 12 oz fish cook in roughly the time of one, not double.
- Melted butterIn Victorian usage this means the flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. Dutch sauce is broadly the hollandaise type, an egg-and-butter sauce sharpened with vinegar or lemon. Shrimp and anchovy sauces are usually that same melted-butter base with pounded shrimp or anchovy essence stirred through.
- The hot napkinA folded linen napkin on the platter absorbs the water that keeps draining out of a poached fish. A rack set over a warm dish, or a folded tea towel, does the job without ceremony.
- Walton's court-bouillonBeer, vinegar and water with lemon peel, rosemary, thyme, winter savory and horseradish makes a strongly flavoured liquor. Use it for a robustly sauced fish; for trout served with hollandaise it will overwhelm.
- YieldReckon one whole trout of 10-12 oz per person, or a 2-3 lb fish for four.
Cassell's is quoting The Compleat Angler (1653), where Izaak Walton gives directions for cooking the fish his readers had just caught; the beer-and-herb liquor is characteristic of seventeenth-century fish cookery, when ale is often said to have served in place of wine in English kitchens and horseradish and winter savory were common garden herbs rather than specialities. Boiling appears to have been a usual treatment for freshwater fish in Britain well into the nineteenth century, partly because a whole poached fish on a napkin was a handsome dish for the table and partly because the sauce, not the fish, was where the cook's reputation lay. The list of tureen sauces here is the giveaway: melted butter, shrimp, anchovy and Dutch cover the whole conventional range.