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Boiled Salmon-Trout
Buy a small fish and, after cleaning it, place it in a kettle with enough boiling water to cover, and add 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar to the water. The fish should be sewed up in a piece of cheesecloth and placed carefully into the kettle. Boil, allowing twelve minutes to each pound of fish. When done, remove the fish carefully, and turn out of the cloth upon a hot platter. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and pour a well-seasoned white sauce over it. Garnish the platter with sprigs of parsley and thin slices of lemon.
A straightforward poached whole fish. The one change worth making is the heat: a hard boil at twelve minutes to the pound will overcook a trout badly.
- Do not actually boilBring the water up, then hold it at a bare shiver, around 175-180F, with no rolling bubbles. Vigorous boiling tears the skin and squeezes the flesh dry even inside the cloth.
- TimingTwelve minutes per pound suits a thick fish in slow water, but modern practice goes by thickness: about 8-10 minutes per inch at the deepest point. A fish of 2-3 lb (the recipe specifies only 'a small fish') is usually done in 15-20 minutes. The flesh should part cleanly from the backbone; cooks who prefer trout at the softer, moister stage pull it at 130-135F, though standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F.
- The cheeseclothSewing the fish into cloth is what makes a whole fish liftable in one piece. Leave long tails of cloth at each end to use as handles, or lay the wrapped fish on a rack or improvised sling of foil. Rinse the cloth first so it does not shed sizing into the water.
- The vinegarTwo tablespoons in a kettle of water firms the flesh slightly and helps keep it white. Plain water works; a court bouillon with onion, bay, peppercorns and a little salt works better, since the recipe's water is otherwise unseasoned.
- "Salmon-trout"An older market name, applied variously to large sea-run or lake trout with pink flesh rather than to one fixed species. Any whole trout, char or small salmon of a few pounds behaves the same way here.
- The white sauceA basic bechamel, 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned well. Whisking in a little of the strained poaching liquid, plus lemon juice, dill or capers, keeps it from tasting flat against the fish.
- YieldA 2-3 lb whole fish serves three or four as a main course. Serve immediately: poached fish cools fast on a platter, so warm the platter thoroughly.
Whole poached fish under white sauce was a common formal treatment of freshwater and sea-run trout in American and British cookery through the nineteenth century, and long fish kettles with perforated lifting plates were sold for the job. "Salmon-trout" seems to have functioned as a market label rather than the name of a single species, generally applied to a large pink-fleshed trout that looked and ate like salmon; it appears often in Victorian fish chapters and is now rare in retail use. The cheesecloth wrapping does the work that a kettle-and-plate would otherwise do, letting a cook get a whole fish to the table intact.