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Baked Salmon Trout
Clean and wash a salmon trout, salt it well both inside and out and let it stand for an hour; wash off all the salt, dry it, stuff it with fish forcemeat, tie up the head to keep it in shape, put the fish upon a well-buttered drainer in a fishkettle, pour over eight ounces of butter sauce, add two quarts of mushrooms, two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley. a blanched shallot, also chopped, a small quantity each of salt, pepper, grated nutmeg and ground spices. Pour in one quart of white wine, bring the liquor quickly to the boil, place the kettle in the oven and cook slowly and gently for an hour. Take out the fish and skin it; untie the head, cover it with rasped bread, pour over a little warmed butter, place the fish in the oven for about five minutes, dress it on a dish and serve with one-half its strained stock poured over and the remainder in a sauceboat.
A classic hotel braise: the fish is cooked in wine and butter sauce rather than plain water, and the liquor becomes the sauce. The one thing to change is the hour in the oven.
- The timingAn hour of oven braising will reduce a 3-4 lb trout to dry flakes. Modern practice is roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, pulling the fish at 125-130F internal; for a whole fish of that size in a covered kettle, expect 25-35 minutes. Test at the backbone rather than by the clock.
- "Cook slowly and gently"No oven temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. Something in the region of 325F, kettle covered, with the liquid barely trembling, answers the instruction.
- What a salmon trout isIn this period the name covered sea trout (brown trout run to salt water) and, in American kitchens, large lake trout. Any whole 3-4 lb trout, char, or a small salmon will behave the same way.
- Butter sauceNot melted butter. Oscar means the kitchen's sauce au beurre - a light flour-thickened white sauce finished with butter. Eight ounces is about a cup. A cup of well-made fish velouté or a thin béchamel loosened with fish stock stands in for it.
- Fish forcemeatA quenelle mixture: lean white fish (pike, whiting, sole) pounded or processed with egg white, a bread or flour panade, and cream, seasoned and chilled. Allow about 8 oz of forcemeat for a fish this size, and do not pack the cavity tight or it will split.
- Two quarts of mushroomsA volume measure, not a weight - roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of whole button mushrooms. It is a great deal of mushroom, and it is there to flavour the braising liquor as much as to be eaten.
- "Ground spices"Unspecified in the recipe; most likely a mixed spice blend of the sort kitchens kept, along the lines of quatre epices (pepper, nutmeg, clove, and ginger or cinnamon), though the book does not say which. A pinch is enough; the nutmeg is already called for separately.
- Kettle and drainerA fish kettle is a long covered pan with a perforated lifting tray. Without one, set the fish on a rack in a covered roasting pan, or cradle it in a double thickness of cheesecloth with the ends left long so it can be lifted out whole.
- Rasped bread and the final five minutesRasped bread is dry crumb grated from a stale crust - coarser than commercial breadcrumbs. Five minutes at 425F, or a minute under the broiler, is only to colour the coating; the fish is already cooked.
- The sauceStrain the braising liquor and reduce it hard before serving - a quart of wine plus the butter sauce yields far more liquid than the dish needs, and reduction is what makes it taste of anything. Serves six as a course.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and its fish chapter is essentially the French repertoire as a large American hotel practised it. This is a truite saumonée braisée: whole fish stuffed with quenelle forcemeat, braised in white wine on a drainer so it can be lifted out intact, then skinned, crumbed, and glazed for a moment in the oven - a sequence that exists because a whole fish had to arrive at the table looking whole. The preliminary hour in salt, washed off before cooking, is an older habit meant to firm the flesh of a soft-fleshed river or lake fish before it met the liquid. "Salmon trout" was a loose market name on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Waldorf's kitchen would have taken whatever large trout the day's supply offered.