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Boiled Carp
Clean and wash one or two carp, place them in a saucepan, pour over sufficient rich beef gravy to cover, and add a bunch of sweet herbs, an onion, four cloves, and salt to the taste. Place the saucepan on a moderate fire and cook gently for an hour or until the fish is done. Pour into a saucepan a pint of strong beef gravy, with two wineglassfuls of white wine; allow this to get hot, and add the strained juice of half a lemon. Place the carp on a dish, pour over the hot lemon-flavored liquor and serve promptly.
A nineteenth-century treatment of a freshwater fish, poached in meat stock rather than court bouillon. The proportions are generous but the timing needs correcting.
- The hour is far too longThe hour is longer than needed -- and the recipe's own "or until the fish is done" allows for less. A whole carp of 3-4 lb is usually cooked through in around half an hour at a bare simmer; fillets in 8-10 minutes. Test at the thickest part behind the head and pull it off the heat when the flesh flakes from the bone.
- "Moderate fire" on the stovetopThis means a gentle simmer with the surface barely trembling, not a rolling boil. Hard boiling breaks carp apart and clouds the liquor.
- Rich beef gravyNot thickened pan gravy in the modern sense but strong brown beef stock, reduced and lightly bodied. Good unsalted beef stock reduced by a third will do; salt only at the end, since the second reduction concentrates it.
- WineglassfulReckon about 2 fl oz, so two glasses is roughly half a cup of dry white wine.
- Bunch of sweet herbsParsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, the ancestor of the bouquet garni. Tie it so it lifts out cleanly before the liquor is strained.
- Onion and clovesStick the four cloves into the peeled onion so they can be retrieved in one piece rather than fished out of the poaching liquid.
- The sauceThe pint of beef gravy is a separate quantity, not the poaching liquid; the recipe simply heats it with the wine, though reducing it a little will give more body. The lemon juice goes in at the end, as the original directs.
- Handling and yieldCarp skin is tough and the fish is heavy with fine bones; poach it in cheesecloth or on a rack so it can be lifted whole. One fish of 3-4 lb serves four.
- MuddinessCarp from still or muddy water can carry an earthy flavour associated with the skin and the dark lateral line. The usual advice is to trim that strip out before cooking, and a preliminary soak in salted water is often recommended.
Carp was a pond fish long before it was a river fish in European cooking, stocked in monastic and manorial stew ponds because it grew fast, tolerated still water and could be kept alive until needed for a fast day. Recipes like this one, poaching the fish in beef stock and finishing with wine and lemon, belong to a much older tradition than Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf: the same method appears in English and German cookery books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and carp in a dark, wine-sharpened sauce remains a Central European Christmas dish. Its presence in an American hotel book of 1896 may plausibly owe something to the German-speaking kitchens then staffing New York's grand hotels, though that is an inference rather than a documented explanation; it certainly reflects the fact that common carp, introduced deliberately into American waters in the 1870s, had by then spread widely enough to be a cheap and available fish.