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To Dress Coarse Fish
Any fish is good if dressed in this way. Make a brown sauce, well flouring it with salt, pepper, and dried herbs. Mince and fry a shallot and add it, then a large glass of red wine, a few drops of lemon juice. Cook some fish roe, sieve it, and stir it into the sauce. Take your fish and simmer it in milk and water till cooked, then heat it up quickly in the sauce to serve.
A terse wartime note rather than a formal recipe: it assumes you already know how to build a brown sauce and how to poach a fish. The quantities are all left to the cook, so treat the list below as the scaffolding.
- "Coarse fish"An angling term, not a culinary insult: freshwater fish other than trout and salmon, so carp, bream, tench, roach, pike, perch. They are bony and can taste of the mud they live in, which is exactly why they are given a strong wine sauce here. Any firm white sea fish works in their place.
- "Dressed"In this period it means prepared or served, not sauced with vinaigrette. The instruction is simply how to treat the fish, start to finish.
- The brown sauceA roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut brown, then let down with stock. "Well flouring it with salt, pepper, and dried herbs" probably means seasoning the flour before it goes in, though the phrasing is loose. Around 2 tbsp each butter and flour to 2 cups of stock gives a fairly thin sauce; use less liquid if you want it thick enough to coat the fish.
- A large glass of red winePerhaps around 150 ml on a modern reading, though period wineglass measures were often much smaller, nearer 2 fl oz. Add it after the shallot; letting it reduce before the sauce goes back together will take off the raw edge, though the recipe does not say to.
- The roeHard roe from cod or herring is the easiest to find; poach it gently until firm, then push it through a sieve. It adds body and flavour on top of the roux, and the recipe has it stirred into the sauce before the fish is reheated in it.
- Poaching in milk and waterHalf and half, barely trembling, never at a rolling boil. A fillet needs 5-8 minutes and a whole small fish 10-15; the milk is traditionally said to keep the flesh white and to draw off some of the muddiness of river fish.
- Reheating in the sauce"Heat it up quickly" is the hinge. The fish is already cooked, so it wants no more than a minute in the hot sauce to warm through, otherwise it breaks up into shreds.
- YieldSauce made to the proportions above serves four, with about 1 1/2 lb of fish. Boiled potatoes are the obvious accompaniment.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, with the proceeds going to relief work; the brisk, spoken quality of a page like this one, and its missing quantities, are part of the book's character. Cooking freshwater fish in red wine is long-established across northern France and the Low Countries, where the matelote tradition treats river fish as though it were meat, and thickening the sauce with sieved roe is a thrifty old technique that gives body without cream or extra butter. That the book bothers to instruct readers on carp and bream at all is telling: these were canal and river fish, cheap or free to anyone with a line.