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Trout, with Genoese Sauce
Empty, clean, and dry two moderate-sized fresh trout, and put them into a kettle of boiling water with a table-spoonful of salt and a table-spoonful of vinegar. Boil the fish gently until they are done enough, then lift them up carefully, and pour over them some sauce prepared as follows. Thicken a pint of good stock with a dessert-spoonful of brown thickening, and boil it till it is smooth and coats the spoon. Put with it a glassful of claret or port, a tea-spoonful of essence of anchovy, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley, the eighth of a nutmeg, grated, a small lump of sugar, and pepper and salt if required. Stir the sauce over the fire for five or six minutes, take it off, and stir into it a piece of fresh butter the size of a walnut, until it is dissolved. Pour the sauce over the trout, and serve immediately. Time to boil, according to size. The fish is done enough when the eyes start. Sufficient for two persons. Half this quantity of sauce may be made, but the proportions should be maintained.
A Victorian red-wine fish sauce over plain poached trout. The two things that need translating are the thickening and the doneness cue.
- Poach, do not boilA rolling boil splits trout skin and shreds the flesh. Bring the salted, acidulated water to a boil, slide the fish in, then hold it at a bare shiver — around 170-180F — until done. Whole trout of 10-12 oz take roughly 8-10 minutes.
- "Until the eyes start"The old test is the eye turning opaque white and bulging from the socket. It is reliable but late; the fish is closer to ideal when the flesh at the thickest point behind the head just parts from the bone, about 130F.
- Brown thickeningA made-in-advance browned flour-and-fat thickening of the kind Victorian books kept in a jar; recipes of the period vary between flour cooked with butter to a nut-brown roux and flour simply browned dry. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, which is light for a pint of stock; expect a sauce that coats rather than clings, and cook another minute or two if you want it thicker.
- Spoon and glass measuresA dessert-spoon is 2 teaspoons, a tablespoon 3. A "glassful" of claret or port means a wine glass used as a measure, usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. The "lump of sugar" is a single sugar cube, about a teaspoon.
- Essence of anchovy and mushroom ketchupEssence of anchovy was a thin, sharply salty bottled extract; anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a mashed salted anchovy, stands in. Mushroom ketchup is still sold, and Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute — halve the quantity, as it is more assertive.
- StockThe brown thickening implies a brown meat stock, and that is what gives the sauce body against the wine; beef or veal stock works. Fish stock is not wrong in principle — classic red-wine fish sauces were often made with it — but it will give a lighter, sharper result than the browned thickening suggests.
- Finishing with butterThe butter goes in off the heat and must not be allowed to boil afterwards, or the sauce breaks and turns greasy. A walnut-sized piece is about 1 tablespoon; swirl it in and serve at once.
- YieldAs written, two trout and a pint of sauce serve two, with more sauce than most modern plates want. Half the sauce, as the recipe allows, is ample.
Sauce génoise belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of red-wine sauces for fish, and English cookery books took it up for trout and salmon. Cassell's version is thoroughly anglicised: the mushroom ketchup, essence of anchovy and grated nutmeg are the standard bottled seasonings of a Victorian larder, and they do the work that a long-reduced fumet and a handful of aromatics would do in a French kitchen. The fish is poached by the plainest possible method, with salt and vinegar to firm the flesh, while all the interest is loaded into a sauce built on a made-in-advance brown thickening.