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Mountain Trout
Besides being the unbeatable Beet State, Colorado is also the Mountain Trout State without an equal. Fine cold mountain water makes speckled and rainbow trout extra firm and fat, along with California golden trout that have been planted there.
Small trout are usually rolled in corn meal, bread crumbs, or flour and fried quickly, but the big "rainbows" are laid open on a grill and lashed with bacon, to baste automatically as they broil. For frying, butter is best, made snappy by stirring in lemon juice, Worcestershire, salt, and red pepper.
This is a method sketch rather than a measured recipe: two ways to cook trout, small and large, with a seasoned butter for the pan. The quantities are left to the cook, so work by the fish.
- "Laid open"This means butterflied — the fish split down the backbone and opened flat, skin side down on the grill, rather than filleted off the bone. A whole trout of 1 to 2 lb opens out to roughly an even thickness and cooks in one pass.
- Lashing with baconThin strips laid across the opened fish, or wrapped around a whole one and secured with soaked toothpicks or butcher's twine. The fat renders and bastes as promised, but most bacon sold today is brine-pumped rather than dry-cured, so taste before adding any further salt to the fish.
- Grill heat and timingMedium-hot coals, and figure about 10 minutes total per inch of thickness — for most trout that is 4 to 6 minutes a side. The flesh should just turn opaque and pull from the bone; 145F at the thickest point is the safe finish.
- Frying the small ones"Fried quickly" is the whole point. A 6 to 10 inch trout, dredged and dropped into hot fat, needs 3 to 4 minutes a side and no more. Shake the excess cornmeal off or it burns in the butter.
- Butter that will not burnWhole butter over a hot pan scorches before the fish is done. Clarify it, or use half butter and half neutral oil, and add the lemon juice and Worcestershire off the heat at the end so they season rather than steam.
- "Red pepper"In American books of this period this is cayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chile. A pinch is enough for two fish; the sauce should be sharp from the lemon and Worcestershire, not hot.
- YieldOne 8 to 10 inch pan trout per person; a large rainbow of 2 lb or more, opened on the grill, serves two.
Colorado's trout reputation was built as much by hatcheries as by nature. State and federal fish culture spread rainbow trout — a Pacific-slope native — into high cold streams across the Rockies from the late nineteenth century onward, along with California golden trout, which is why a Colorado creel could hold fish from three different watersheds. The "speckled" trout of such passages is usually the eastern brook trout, itself an import, and the state's own greenback cutthroat had already been pushed to the edges by the time this was written. The aside about the "Beet State" dates the piece too: sugar beets were Colorado's signature crop for decades, and regional cookbooks of the era liked to introduce a dish by boosting the state it came from before saying a word about the pan.