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Trout, Stewed in Wine
Empty, clean, and dry two or three fresh trout; put them in a stewpan, pour over them equal parts of good gravy and either claret, port, or Madeira, and add a moderate-sized onion, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, six allspice, two cloves, and a little salt. Let them simmer gently until done enough. Take them up carefully, strain the gravy, thicken it with brown thickening, and flavour with a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice or chilli vinegar, a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence, and a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Strain the sauce over the fish, and serve very hot. Time to simmer, half an hour to three-quarters, according to the thickness of the fish. Sufficient for a small dish.
A Victorian brown-sauce treatment for river fish, workable today provided the simmering time is ignored. Everything else is a matter of translating store-cupboard names.
- The timing is the problemHalf an hour to three-quarters will reduce a trout to cotton wool. Whole trout of 8-10 oz are done in 8-12 minutes at a bare simmer, when the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone; the liquid should barely tremble.
- "Good gravy"Not meat drippings but the brown stock of the period, made from beef or veal bones. A good unsalted beef or veal stock stands in; use it at half strength if it is concentrated, since the sauce is reduced and salted further by the anchovy.
- Brown thickeningFlour cooked in butter until nut-brown; such thickenings were often prepared ahead and kept for use, though browned flour alone was also called by the name. Make it fresh: equal weights butter and flour cooked to a hazelnut colour, then whisked into the strained liquor, about 1 oz of each per pint of sauce.
- Mushroom ketchup and anchovy essenceBoth still sold in Britain. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, not the American tomato sort; a splash of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid approximates it. For anchovy essence, mash one or two anchovy fillets into the sauce.
- Chilli vinegarVinegar steeped with dried chillies, easily made or replaced with wine vinegar and a pinch of cayenne. It is an alternative to the lemon juice, not an addition.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. "Six allspice" means six whole berries; the peppercorns are whole as well, which is why the sauce is strained.
- Which wineClaret gives the lightest result and port the sweetest; which suits trout best is a matter of taste. Use something you would drink, since wine makes up about half the stewing liquid and nothing masks a poor one.
- YieldTwo or three trout serve two to three people as a main course. The sauce is rich and dark.
Cassell's treats this as one of the brown-sauce fish dishes of the Victorian table, where freshwater fish were dressed much like game: stewed in fortified wine, thickened with browned flour, and sharpened with bottled flavourings — anchovy essence, mushroom ketchup and a spiced vinegar. Those bottles did the work that stock reduction and fresh herbs do now, and they recur in recipes of the period because they kept well and gave depth to sauces built on limited stock. Fish stewed in wine has a long earlier history in English and French cookery; by the time this dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century the technique was a standard household method.