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Trout, Fried
Empty, clean, and dry the fish thoroughly, cut off the fins and gills, but leave the heads on. Rub them over with flour, and fry them in plenty of hot fat. When they are brown on one side, turn them carefully upon the other. Lift them out, and drain them on blotting-paper before the fire. Serve on a hot napkin, garnish with parsley, and send plain melted butter or any other suitable sauce to table with them. If liked, the flour may be dusted off, and the trout may afterwards be dipped in beaten egg, covered with bread-crumbs, and fried as before. This is a favourite way of dressing trout. Time to fry, six to ten minutes, according to size. Sufficient, three or four trout for a dish.
A plain shallow-fry that still works exactly as written, provided the fish is dry and the fat genuinely hot. A few of the book's props and terms need translating.
- The hinge: dry fish, hot fatTrout hold water in the cavity and under the skin, and damp fish steams rather than browns. Pat them thoroughly inside and out, flour just before frying, and get the fat to about 350-360F so the crust sets on contact.
- "Plenty of hot fat"This means shallow-frying in perhaps half an inch of fat in a heavy pan, not deep-frying: the recipe has you turn the fish onto its other side. The book does not say which fat; lard, dripping or clarified butter would all have been usual choices. A neutral oil with a knob of butter added near the end gives the same result without burning.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper. "Before the fire" simply means somewhere warm, so the fish does not cool while the rest are frying — a rack in a 200F oven does the job.
- Emptying the fishGutting. Scrape out the dark line along the backbone with a thumbnail or teaspoon. Leaving the heads on is largely a matter of presentation, and taking them off makes little practical difference.
- Melted butterIn Victorian usage this is not just butter melted, but a flour-thickened butter sauce — a light roux let down with water or fish stock. A beurre noisette with lemon and parsley is the closer modern equivalent to what the dish wants.
- TimingSix to ten minutes total suits pan-sized trout, taken as roughly three to five minutes a side; the book only says "according to size". The fish is done when the flesh at the thickest part of the back parts from the bone; an instant-read thermometer should show about 145F.
- The egg-and-crumb variationDusting off the flour matters — loose flour under the egg turns to paste and the crumbs slide off in the pan. Flour, then egg, then fine dry crumbs, and let the coated fish sit ten minutes before frying so it adheres.
- YieldThree or four whole trout serve three or four as a main course, or four to six as a first course. A hot napkin means a folded linen cloth on the platter to absorb fat; a warmed plate does as well.
Fried trout appears in Cassell's among the plainest of fish dishes because trout were, for much of the nineteenth century, a fish you caught rather than bought — river and stream fish that needed no elaborate treatment to justify themselves. The recipe offers two coatings, plain floured or else egged and crumbed, describing the method only as a favourite way of dressing trout; the crumb coating is often said to have been the dressier option. Serving on a folded napkin was a common English presentation for fried fish, the linen absorbing fat that would otherwise pool on the dish, and the sprig of fried or fresh parsley alongside was so nearly universal that cookery books of the period often note it without explanation. Melted butter, meaning the flour-bound sauce rather than the plain liquid fat, was the default English accompaniment to fish for a long period before continental butter sauces displaced it.