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Tench Stewed with Wine
INGREDIENTS.-Tench, pint of stock, pint of Madeira or sherry, salt and pepper to taste, 1 bay-leaf, thickening of butter and flour.
Clean and crimp the tench, carefully lay it in a stewpan with the stock, wine, salt and pepper, and bay-leaf, let it stew gently for 1/2 hour then take it out, put it on a dish, and keep hot. Strain the liquor, and thicken it with butter and flour kneaded together, and stew for 5 minutes. If not perfectly smooth, squeeze it through a tammy, add a very little cayenne, and pour over the fish. Garnish with balls of veal forcemeat.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE from October to June.
A straightforward wine braise, but nearly everything about it — the fish, the vessels, the fractions — belongs to another century. The quantities as printed have lost their fractions in transcription; Beeton's stewed fish of this type run to about half a pint each of stock and wine, which is roughly a cup of each and enough to half-submerge a fish of two pounds.
- Getting a tenchTench is a bottom-feeding member of the carp family, still eaten in central and eastern Europe but effectively absent from British and American fish counters. Common carp, or any firm freshwater fish of similar size, behaves the same way in the pan; sea bass or grey mullet will also take this treatment.
- "Crimp"Crimping meant slashing the sides of a very fresh fish to the bone at intervals and dropping it briefly into cold, sometimes salted, water so the flesh contracted and firmed. It is unnecessary with anything bought from a shop; simply scale, gut and score the sides so the braise penetrates.
- The mud problemTench and carp carry an earthy, weedy flavour concentrated in the skin and the dark lateral flesh. A soak in acidulated or salted water before cooking is often recommended. Scaling thoroughly and discarding the skin after braising does most of the work.
- Half an hour is a long timeThirty minutes suits a whole fish of two pounds or more, kept at a bare tremble rather than a simmer. Smaller fish or fillets will be done in eight to twelve minutes; test at the thickest point behind the head, where the flesh should just part from the bone.
- Thickening of butter and flourThis is beurre manié — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the strained liquor off the boil, then simmered to cook out the flour. Around 15 g of each will thicken two cups of liquid to a coating sauce.
- TammyA tammy was a worsted or fine-woven cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine conical strainer, or a stick blender followed by a sieve, does the same job.
- Veal forcemeat ballsMinced veal bound with breadcrumbs, suet, egg and lemon zest, rolled small and poached or fried. Modern cooks generally skip them; if you want the garnish, poach the balls in the stock before the fish goes in so they take on the wine.
- Wine and yieldUse a dry oloroso or a dry sercial Madeira rather than anything sweet, or the reduced sauce turns cloying. A whole fish of this size serves two to three as a main course.
Tench was a serious food fish in Britain for centuries before it became a coarse-angling curiosity: it thrived in the stew ponds of monasteries and manor houses, tolerated warm, low-oxygen water that would kill trout, and was said to travel to market alive more readily than most fish. That practicality is why it survives in Victorian cookery books like this one, where it sits alongside carp and eel, and why the season given runs from October to June — spawning fish, and fish taken in high summer from warm shallow water, were reckoned poor eating. The heavy dose of Madeira or sherry is not extravagance so much as strategy: the wine, the bay and the cayenne are all there to stand up to a muddy-tasting fish. As rail-borne sea fish spread, tench seems to have become largely redundant in the British kitchen, and entries like this one read as the tail end of a much older pond-fish tradition.