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Trout, Wayside Inn
Clean and empty the trout, dry them, and boil them until done enough. Lift them out carefully so as not to break them, put them upon a hot dish without a napkin, and cover them entirely with rich melted butter. Sprinkle a table-spoonful of chopped gherkins over the sauce, and garnish the dish with parsley and sliced lemon. Time to simmer the fish, ten to twenty minutes, according to size.
A plain poached trout dressed in the Victorian manner. Two things in the original will mislead a modern cook: what "melted butter" meant, and how long the fish is meant to stay in the water.
- "Rich melted butter" is a sauceIn English cookery of this period, "melted butter" usually meant a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain warmed butter: butter and flour cooked together and thinned with water or the fish liquor, then finished with more butter off the heat. Proportions vary from book to book. Simply pouring warm butter over the fish gives a greasier dish, and the sauce will not sit round the trout as intended.
- Do not actually boilThe instruction says boil, but the timing line says simmer, and the simmer is right. A rolling boil splits the skin and breaks the flesh, which is exactly what the recipe then asks you to avoid when lifting the fish out. Bring the water to the boil, slide the trout in, and drop it straight back to a bare tremble.
- The timing is longTen to twenty minutes is generous by modern standards and would suit a large fish. A modern farmed trout of 8 to 12 oz is done in 5 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer; the flesh should just part from the backbone at the thickest point. Anything longer and it turns cottony.
- The cooking liquidThe recipe says nothing about what the trout is boiled in. Use salted water, or better a court-bouillon — water with salt, a splash of vinegar or white wine, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a slice of onion. Plain unsalted water leaches flavour out of the fish and gives you nothing back.
- "Without a napkin"Boiled fish was commonly served on a folded damask napkin to absorb the water draining from it. The direction to omit it here presumably makes room for the sauce to pool round the fish. Drain the trout thoroughly on a cloth before it goes on the dish, or the sauce will thin and separate.
- GherkinsThe Victorian gherkin is a small, firm, sharply vinegared cucumber — a French cornichon is the closest thing on a modern shelf. Sweet pickles or bread-and-butter chips are the wrong register entirely against butter and trout.
- YieldOne trout per person for fish under a pound. A large trout of 2 to 3 lb, poached whole, will serve four, and sits at the upper end of the stated cooking time.
The name here may point at the kind of cooking done where the fish was caught: a trout out of the water, into the pot, and onto the table with a butter sauce because that is what an inn kitchen always had to hand. The pairing of poached freshwater fish with a sharp pickled cucumber is an old one in English cookery — the acid does the work that a squeeze of lemon does now, cutting a sauce that is otherwise flour, butter and not much else. The dish is also a small record of a vanished convention: nineteenth-century cookery books distinguish carefully between fish served on a napkin, to soak up water, and fish served without one so that a sauce can be poured round. Modern readers meet the phrase without knowing there was ever a choice being made.