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Trout A-La-Genevoise
125. Clean the fish very well; put it into a stew-pan, adding half Champagne and half Moselle, or Rhenish, or sherry wine. Season it with pepper, salt, an onion, a few cloves stuck in it, and a small bunch of parsley and thyme; put in it a crust of French bread; set it on a quick fire. When the fish is done, take the bread out, bruise it, and then thicken the sauce with it; add flour and a little butter, and let it boil up. See that the sauce is of a proper thickness. Lay the fish on a dish, and pour the sauce over it. Serve it with sliced lemon and fried bread.
A wine-poached trout in the old French manner, where a piece of dried bread crust does the work a roux would do today. The original gives no quantities, so the judgement calls are all yours.
- How much wineUse enough of the two wines together to come about three-quarters of the way up the fish — roughly 2 cups for a pair of trout in a snug pan. Champagne with Moselle or Rhine wine gives a dry, high-acid poaching liquor; a dry Riesling on its own is the closest single substitute, and the sherry option will give a heavier, more oxidative sauce (sweeter still if a cream or oloroso is used).
- "A quick fire" needs qualifyingBring the wine up briskly, then hold it at a bare shiver — surface trembling, no rolling bubbles. Trout poached at a full boil tightens and the flesh sheds into the sauce. A whole trout of 10-12 oz is done in 8-10 minutes; the flesh should part cleanly at the backbone.
- The bread crust is the thickenerA hard, dry crust of white bread (not soft crumb, not sourdough) breaks down in the wine and is then crushed and whisked back in. Expect a slightly rustic, faintly grainy sauce rather than a smooth one; press it through a sieve if you want it clean.
- Flour and butterWork equal weights of soft butter and flour into a paste — about 1 tablespoon of each — and whisk it in off the boil, then let the sauce come up for a minute to cook out the raw flour. Adding dry flour to hot liquid, as the wording invites, will leave lumps.
- The onion and clovesStick three or four cloves into a peeled onion and lift the whole thing out before saucing. Cloves loose in the pan are unpleasant to bite and will dominate a delicate fish if left too long.
- Reduce before you thickenThe poaching liquid will taste thin and sharp straight off the fish. The recipe says only to see that the sauce is "of a proper thickness"; lifting the trout onto a warm dish and boiling the liquor down by about half before thickening will give a light coating sauce rather than a thin one.
- Fried bread and lemonSmall triangles of white bread fried in butter until crisp, set round the dish. Sliced lemon is a garnish here, not seasoning, though a squeeze into the finished sauce does it no harm.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of fish. Working on one 10-12 oz trout per person, the quantities suggested above serve two; four if the trout are large and filleted at the table.