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Baked Carp
Clean a carp and place it in a bowl of salted cold water and vinegar to let it disgorge. Remove, drain and dry it, stuff with well-seasoned forcemeat, sew up the belly, brush it with egg, dredge breadcrumbs over and put on a few small lumps of butter here and there. Place the fish in a deep earthenware dish with two onions cut in slices and a few sweet herbs, pour over one breakfast cupful each of sweet wine and stock, mixing it with one teaspoonful of anchovy sauce or essence, put the dish in a moderate oven and bake for an hour. Dress the carp carefully on a dish and keep it hot, then strain the liquor into a saucepan, add a lump of butter rolled in flour to thicken and stir continually over the fire until it is done; then mix in half a teaspoonful of sugar, the juice of a lemon and a seasoning of salt and pepper. Pour this into a sauceboat and serve.
Baked Carp,-Mariniere Take a carp weighing from ten to twelve pounds, scale, draw it, and cut a little off the fins and fill the inside with forcemeat. Remove a little of the skin from the back, leaving the flesh exposed, and lard this with fat bacon; then truss the head; place the fish on a drainer in a long fishkettle, season it and fill the kettle to about half the height of the fish with court bouillon and white wine in the proportion of one quart of the former to one-half pint of the latter. . Place the kettle on the fire and let the liquid boil for five minutes; then remove the carp and put it in a moderate oven to bake for about an hour and a half, basting it often. When done, take it out, drain, and pour its stock through a sieve, putting the fish back into the kettle again to keep hot. Prepare a little brown sauce with the stock, and when clarified and strained, put it into a flat stewpan with a handful of mushroom trimmings; pour in a wineglassful of white wine and reduce; then pass it through a sieve, adding a quarter of a pound of good butter. Place the carp on an oval dish and garnish it on both sides with a bunch of quenelles of whitings, one of mushrooms and one of blanched olives; glaze the larding with a paste-brush and pour a little sauce over the other parts of the fish and a little at the bottom of the dish. Put the soft roes into the balance of the sauce and serve in a sauceboat.
Two recipes run together here: a simple stuffed baked carp and the far grander mariniere version built for a banquet table. Both assume a whole scaled fish, a cook comfortable with forcemeat, and an oven that runs slower than yours.
- The soaking is the hingeThe soaking -- Carp raised in still or muddy water can carry an earthy taste, often associated with the skin and the dark lateral flesh. The salted cold water and vinegar bath is the recipe's way of dealing with that, and with slime and blood; the recipe gives no soaking time.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. The first recipe gives no weight for the fish, so judge by the thickest point behind the head rather than by the hour alone; current guidance for fish is 145F.
- Breakfast cupfulAn old breakfast cup holds somewhat more than a modern measuring cup, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Treat it as a cup and top up with stock if the dish looks dry partway through.
- Anchovy sauce or essenceA salty commercial anchovy extract; anchovy essence is still sold in Britain. Anchovy paste or two mashed oil-packed fillets stands in; account for the salt before seasoning the finished sauce.
- The thickening"A lump of butter rolled in flour" is beurre manie, equal weights of soft butter and flour worked together, about a tablespoon of each per cup of liquid. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then return to a simmer to cook out the flour.
- Scale of the second recipeA ten to twelve pound carp is a long fish and needs a correspondingly long kettle; it will feed a large table. Larding the exposed back with bacon lardons keeps the lean top flesh from drying over an hour and a half of baking; a bard of thin bacon laid over the fish does much the same job.
- Court bouillonSimply water simmered with sliced onion, carrot, herbs, peppercorns and a splash of vinegar or wine, then strained. The proportion given, a quart to half a pint of white wine, is a guide; multiply as needed to reach halfway up the fish.
- Soft roesMilt, the male fish's soft roe, folded into the finished sauce at the end. It is rarely sold separately now, so buy the fish whole and undrawn if you want it, and cook it only long enough to firm.
- Bones and sourcingCommon carp carries fine intramuscular Y-bones through the upper fillet; warn the table. Note also that in some regions carp are an invasive species subject to transport restrictions, so buy from a fishmonger rather than moving a live fish yourself.
Carp were a manor and monastery fish long before they were a restaurant fish, farmed in stew ponds across Europe from the Middle Ages precisely because they survive being kept alive in a tank until wanted. That habit of holding the fish in clean water before cooking is what the opening line preserves: the vinegar-and-salt bath is often said to be a domesticated remnant of the older practice of purging a pond carp for days before it reached the kitchen, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Carp long had a firm place on menus, sustained by German, Austrian and Central European kitchens and by the Jewish table, where it was the classic fish for gefilte fish. The second recipe, labelled mariniere and dressed with quenelles of whiting, mushrooms and blanched olives, shows the other tradition at work: an escoffier-era garnish grammar applied to a freshwater fish. Both approaches sat side by side in a hotel kitchen that had to cook for European guests and American ones on the same evening.