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Trout, Sauces For
Any of the following sauces may be served with boiled trout. Plain melted butter, anchovy sauce, shrimp sauce, parsley sauce, Dutch sauce, ravigote sauce, or a sauce prepared thus. Boil half a pint of melted butter with two table-spoonfuls of thick cream. Mix the yolk of an egg with another table-spoonful of cream, and stir the thickening into the sauce, first letting it cool for one minute; add the juice of a lemon and a pinch of salt, and stir the sauce over the fire until it is on the point of boiling. Lift it off, and stir into it an ounce of fresh butter until it is dissolved. Serve the sauce in a tureen or poured over the fish. Or bone and skin an anchovy, and pound the flesh in a mortar with a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a table-spoonful of chopped chives, or a minced shallot, a table-spoonful of capers, a dessert-spoonful of flour, and a piece of butter the size of an egg. When the mixture is quite smooth, stir it into a pint of the liquor in which the fish was boiled. Let it boil a minute or two, and send it to table in a tureen. Fried trout is very good served cold and accompanied by salad sauce.
Two sauces are given in full here, plus a list of stock Victorian accompaniments. Both hinge on understanding what a nineteenth-century English cook meant by "melted butter" — and on keeping the egg liaison below a simmer.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn British cookery of this period melted butter means a white sauce: butter and flour cooked together and let down with water or milk. Proportions vary from book to book, commonly somewhere between a dessert-spoonful and an ounce of flour, with one to four ounces of butter, to half a pint of liquid. Simply melting butter and adding cream will give you a broken, greasy sauce.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are imperial: half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups, and the pint of fish liquor in the second sauce is 20 fl oz or 2½ cups. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons; "a piece of butter the size of an egg" is about 2 oz (50 g).
- The egg must not boil"Stir the sauce over the fire until it is on the point of boiling" is the line to treat carefully. At around 180F the sauce visibly thickens and coats the spoon; a yolk-thickened sauce can curdle not far above that, though the flour in the melted-butter base gives it some protection. Letting the base cool for a minute before the yolk goes in serves the same end.
- Finishing butter off the heatThe ounce of fresh butter stirred in after the pan leaves the fire is not an afterthought; it emulsifies into the sauce and gives it gloss. Add it in small pieces and do not return the pan to the burner.
- Anchovies then and nowThe anchovy to be boned and pounded is a whole salt-cured fish. Two or three oil-packed fillets, rinsed and mashed, stand in for one; taste before adding any salt, since the fish liquor is already seasoned.
- The second sauce needs cooking outA dessert-spoonful of raw flour pounded into the butter is a beurre manié. "Boil a minute or two" is the minimum — give it three or four minutes at a gentle simmer or the sauce will taste of flour.
- The named saucesDutch sauce is the Victorian name for hollandaise. Ravigote existed in both a cold vinaigrette form and a warm one — a velouté or butter sauce sharpened with vinegar and green herbs; served with hot boiled fish the warm version is the likelier of the two. "Salad sauce" served with the cold fried trout most probably means a mayonnaise or a made cream-and-mustard dressing rather than a vinaigrette.
- YieldNeither sauce is quantified for eaters. The first makes roughly 1½ cups, the second about 2½ cups — enough for four to six portions of fish, the second being the more generous.
Cassell's list reflects a settled English convention: boiled fish arrived at table under a sauce built on the flour-and-butter base that cookbooks of the day called simply "melted butter," varied with anchovy, shrimp, parsley or capers depending on the fish. The two recipes given in full show the two directions that base could take — enriched upward with cream and egg yolk toward the French liaison, or pulled back toward the kitchen economy of thickening with the liquor in which the trout was boiled, so that nothing was wasted. In the second, the appearance of chives, shallot and capers pounded in a mortar marks the steady absorption of French technique into English domestic cookery through the second half of the nineteenth century. The closing note about cold fried trout with salad sauce is a reminder of how much Victorian eating was arranged around the second appearance of a dish, cold, at breakfast or supper.