Home › The Principles of Cookery › TROUT, STEWED (another way)
TROUT, STEWED (another way)
Empty, clean, and dry one large (or two moderate-sized) trout, and partially fry in hot butter till it is lightly browned. Pour over it as much good stock as will barely cover it, and add a bunch of parsley, a bay-leaf, a roll of thin lemon-rind, a finely-minced shallot, and a little pepper and salt. Let it simmer very gently until done enough. Place it on a hot dish, thicken the gravy with a tea-spoonful of brown thickening, boil it till of the proper consistency, and strain it over the fish. A glassful of port or claret or a tea-spoonful of lemon juice may be added or not. Time to simmer the fish, half an hour to three-quarters, according to size. Sufficient for two persons.
A Victorian braise for whole trout, sound in method but badly out of step on timing. Everything else is a matter of translating the pantry.
- The timing is the hingeHalf an hour to three-quarters will reduce a trout to cotton wool. A whole trout of about a pound, barely covered in simmering stock, is done in 10-15 minutes; the flesh should just part from the backbone at the thickest point. The long time in the original assumes a much larger fish than most people buy today.
- Brown thickeningIn Victorian cookery this generally means flour browned, often with butter, and kept ready in a jar. Substitute a teaspoon of beurre manie, or make a small brown roux and whisk it into the strained liquid off the heat before returning it to the boil.
- "Good stock"In a Victorian kitchen this would usually have meant the everyday brown or white meat stock rather than fish stock. A light chicken stock works well and is arguably closer to the intent than a fish fumet, which can taste redundant against the trout.
- A glassful of wineA wine glass of the period is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz (60 ml). Add it with the stock rather than at the end so the alcohol has time to cook off, or use less port if you want it less sweet.
- Shallot and lemon rindUse a strip of rind pared with a peeler and no white pith, and pull it out before straining if the braise has run long. Both the parsley and the bay are meant to be discarded, so tying them together saves work.
- "Partially fry"The point is colour, not cooking. Dry the fish thoroughly, give it a minute or two a side in hot butter, and move on before the butter blackens; clarified butter or a butter-oil mix is more forgiving.
- YieldTwo people, as stated, if the fish is a pound or so. Serve with boiled potatoes to take the sauce, which is thin and abundant by design.
Cassell's gives several stewed-trout methods in succession, which tells you something about how the fish reached the Victorian table: freshwater trout was a river and estate fish, often arriving whole and unfilleted, and a gentle braise in stock was the standard way to cook a fish too delicate for hard roasting and too handsome to break up. The technique here is a shallow braise in meat stock rather than water, thickened at the last minute with browned flour, a common liaison in nineteenth-century English kitchens. The optional glass of port or claret reflects an English habit of finishing fish sauces with wine, an approach that also appears in red-wine fish dishes such as matelote and in the wine-dark sauces served with eel.