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Trout, Pickled
Take the remains of cold boiled or stewed trout. Remove the skin and bones, divide the flesh into neat pieces, put these into a deep dish, and strain over them a pickle prepared as follows. Mince three moderate-sized onions, and put them into a stewpan with a piece of butter the size of an egg, a chopped turnip, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, a dessert-spoonful of salt, and a tea-spoonful of white pepper. Stir these ingredients over a gentle fire for five minutes; pour over them a pint of vinegar and a pint of boiling water. Let the liquor boil for twenty minutes, and it will be ready for use. Trout thus pickled will keep three or four days, and the same pickle may be used three or four times if it is freshly boiled when required.
This is a leftovers dish: cooked trout given a second life in a hot spiced vinegar. The pickle is poured over the fish boiling hot, which is what sets both texture and keeping quality.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is there to sweat the onion and turnip, not to enrich the pickle, so the quantity is forgiving.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint each of vinegar and boiling water is about 2 1/2 cups each, five cups of liquor in total. That is enough to cover the flesh of two or three trout in a deep dish.
- Which vinegarUse a 5 per cent white wine or cider vinegar. Malt vinegar works and was the likely original, but it stains the fish brown. The equal dilution with water brings the acidity down to roughly 2.5 per cent, which is why this keeps for days rather than weeks.
- Strain, and strain hotThe instruction to strain matters: onion, turnip and herbs left in the dish soften and cloud the liquor. Pour the pickle through a sieve directly onto the fish while it is still hot, so the heat penetrates the pieces.
- Twenty minutes is not too longThe boiling here is for the pickle, not the fish, and the time is needed to draw flavour out of the aromatics and reduce the harshness of the vinegar. The trout itself is already cooked and should be handled as little as possible — lift it in flakes rather than chopping it.
- KeepingThree or four days assumes a cold larder. Refrigerate, keep the fish fully submerged, and treat two to three days as the limit. Serve cold, straight from the pickle, with bread and butter.
- Do not re-use the pickleBoiling it again will kill what has grown in it, but each batch of fish leaves behind protein and dilutes the acid, and the liquor gets progressively less able to preserve. Make it fresh; the ingredients are cheap.
- YieldThe flesh of two medium trout, about 12 oz picked, gives four small first courses.
Pickled or "soused" fish belongs to the older English habit of extending a catch with vinegar and spice rather than throwing anything away, and Cassell's places it firmly in the economical tradition: the recipe opens with "the remains of cold boiled or stewed trout", assuming a household that has already served the fish hot once. The method — sweat the aromatics in butter, add vinegar and water, boil, strain over cold fish — is the same one applied across the period to mackerel, herring and salmon, dishes generally traced back to medieval and Tudor sousing. Before mechanical refrigeration a vinegar bath was one of the few ways to hold cooked fish for even a few days in summer, and the note that the same pickle "may be used three or four times" reflects a frugality that outlasted its own safety margin.