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Baked Trout
Scrape and clean about six pounds of trout, draw them through the gills, wash well, and wipe them inwardly. Stuff them with forcemeat, put them into a baking-pan over a quarter of a pound of melted butter; cover over with a little mushroom liquor or a few mushrooms chopped, also with slices of pork, and sprinkle over three or four tablespoonfuls of chopped onions, a can of mushrooms without any liquor, and one tablespoonful of minced parsley; also salt and pepper to taste. Pour over about one-half pint of stock, place the pan in the oven and bake for half an hour, basting frequently with the liquor in the pan. When done, take the trout out, place them on a dish, and serve with a garnish of potatoes.
Trout, Beyrout Clean a large trout, dry it on a cloth, dredge it over with flour, place it on a gridiron over a clear fire and broil it. When done take it off, remove the skin, place it on a dish, pour over beyrout sauce or fish sauce and serve.
A straightforward oven-braise in butter, stock and mushrooms, written for whole fish and a coal range. The two things the original omits are the oven temperature and any sense of how thick the fish are.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in 1896. A dish of this kind wants a hot-ish oven, 400F, so that the liquor bubbles and reduces rather than stewing the fish.
- Thirty minutes is for large fishSix pounds of trout could be two large fish or eight small ones. Half an hour will overcook pan-sized brook trout badly; they are done in 12-15 minutes. Judge by the flesh at the thickest point pulling cleanly from the backbone. Cooks often pull trout at 135-140F internal, though current food-safety guidance for fish is 145F.
- Drawing through the gillsAn old practice that keeps the belly wall whole so stuffing stays put. Reaching in through the gill opening with a finger or a hook to pull the viscera takes patience; slitting the belly and stitching or skewering it closed is easier and gives the same result.
- ForcemeatLeft unspecified, as was usual for a preparation cooks were assumed to know. For fish, a panade of breadcrumbs soaked in milk with butter, shallot, parsley and an egg to bind is period-appropriate; a fish or oyster forcemeat is grander. Allow roughly a cup for a large trout.
- Slices of porkThis means fat salt pork or fatback cut thin, laid over the fish to baste it. Blanch it a minute if very salty, since you are also salting to taste. Unsmoked streaky bacon is the closest supermarket substitute.
- Mushroom liquor and canned mushroomsMushroom liquor was the strained cooking or canning liquid, used as a seasoning much as we use stock. The size of the can intended is not stated; 8 oz of sliced fresh mushrooms, given a few minutes in butter first, tastes better and releases less water.
- Half a pint of stockOne cup. Fish stock is the obvious choice, though a light veal or chicken stock is what a hotel kitchen would have had standing. The recipe says only to baste frequently; every eight to ten minutes works.
- Yield and the garnishSix pounds of whole trout serves roughly six to eight. 'A garnish of potatoes' most likely means small boiled or turned potatoes arranged around the fish rather than a separate side dish.
- The second recipeTrout Beyrout runs straight on from the first on the same page. It is a plain broiled trout under a sauce; a well-heated grill or a broiler at its highest setting stands in for the gridiron over a clear fire, and the fish needs only a few minutes a side.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book collects the working repertoire of the original Waldorf on Fifth Avenue, and this entry shows the house style plainly: a whole fish, stuffed, barded with pork fat and finished in its own basting liquor, in the manner French kitchens called a braise in the oven. The reliance on canned mushrooms and bottled mushroom liquor is worth noticing, since by the 1890s commercially canned goods were respectable enough for a luxury hotel to list them without apology. The dish also assumes an abundance of trout that no longer exists in American markets; a cook today will most likely be working with farmed rainbow trout. The name of the second recipe presumably refers to Beirut, though nothing here records what, if anything, connected the sauce to the city.