Tench, Matelote of
INGREof port wine, 1 dozen button onions, a few mushrooms, 1 faggot of herbs, 2 blades of parsley, thyme, 1 shalot, 2 anchovies, 1 teamace, 1 oz. of butter, 1 teaspoonful of minced cupful of stock, flour, 1 dozen oysters, the juice if 1/2 lemon; the number of tench, according to size.
Scale and clean the tench, cut them into pieces, and lay them in a stewpan; add the stock, wine, onions, mushrooms, herbs and into another stewpan all the remaining mace, and simmer gently for 1/2 hour. Put ingredients but the oysters and lemon juice, and boil slowly for 10 minutes, when add the strained liquor from the tench, and reduced. Rub it through a sieve, pour it keep stirring it over the fire until somewhat over the tench with the oysters, which must be previously scalded in their own liquor, squeeze in the lemon-juice, and serve.
Garnish with croûtons.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE from October to June.
TENCH, STEWED.
A matelote is a fish stew finished with a reduced wine sauce, and the sauce is where the work lies. The fish itself needs far less time than the original allows.
- Sourcing tenchTench is a European freshwater carp relative, muddy-flavoured and almost never sold commercially now. Common carp, bream, or a firm-fleshed farmed freshwater fish behave the same way in a red-wine stew; a whole fish of about 1 1/2 lb serves two.
- Cooking time for the fishHalf an hour of simmering will reduce cut pieces of a soft freshwater fish to threads. Poach the pieces 8-10 minutes at a bare tremble, lift them out and keep them warm, then use the liquor to build the sauce as directed.
- The oystersScalding in their own liquor means bringing them just to the point where the edges ruffle, roughly a minute. They then go into the finished sauce off the heat; any further cooking makes them rubbery.
- Faggot of herbsA tied bundle of the parsley stalks and thyme the recipe names (a bay leaf is the usual addition, though this text does not specify one), removed before the sauce is sieved. Use string or tie it inside a leek leaf so it comes out whole.
- Button onionsPearl or small pickling onions, peeled and left whole. A dozen is roughly 6 oz. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save a tedious job.
- AnchoviesTwo anchovies, which in this period means two whole salted fish (four fillets), mashed, or a teaspoon or two of anchovy paste. They are seasoning, not flavour in their own right, and should not be identifiable in the finished sauce.
- Shalot and maceOne shallot, finely chopped, and a blade or two of mace, which is the outer casing of nutmeg and much gentler than ground nutmeg. A pinch of ground mace substitutes.
- Building the sauceThe second pan holds the butter, flour, shallot and anchovy; the stock and mace go into the first pan with the fish. Cook the flour in the butter briefly before the liquid goes in, or the sieved sauce will taste raw. Reduce until it coats a spoon, then add the lemon juice at the very end so the acidity stays bright.
- Wine quantityThe port measure has not survived legibly in this text. The recipe gives a cupful of stock, so wine on roughly that order is the likely intention; port alone will read very sweet, so a dry red with a splash of port is closer to the intended balance.
- CroûtonsTriangles of white bread fried in butter or clarified butter until crisp, arranged round the dish. They are structural as well as decorative, since the sauce is thin enough to want sopping.
Matelote derives from the French matelot, a sailor or boatman, and is traditionally said to describe the boatman's own way of cooking: freshwater fish stewed in wine with onions, the classic dish of the Loire and the Marne rather than of the sea. Tench was a river and pond fish of real standing in England into the nineteenth century, kept in stew ponds on estates and sold alive in town markets, which is why Victorian books carry several recipes for it and why the season is given as October to June, the months outside its spawning. Its reputation for muddiness, generally blamed on the bottom-feeding habit, is exactly what a strong wine sauce with anchovy, mace and lemon is designed to cover. As river fisheries declined and sea fish reached the cities by rail, tench dropped out of the English kitchen almost entirely, surviving in cookery books like this one long after it had left the fishmonger's slab.