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Boiled Perch
Clean and scale the fish, leaving the roe and liver inside. Pour a small quantity of water in a fishkettle with a bunch of parsley, a little salt and pepper, and boil till the parsley is soft; then put in the fish with a lump of butter and boil slowly for ten or twelve minutes. When cooked, remove carefully, lay it on a hot dish, strain the cooking liquor over, and serve with a Dutch sauce.
A plain court-bouillon poach that survives almost unchanged in professional kitchens; the only genuinely dated things about it are the vessel, the sauce name, and the word "boil."
- Do not actually boil"Boil slowly" in period usage generally indicates what we would now call a bare simmer, with the surface barely shivering. A rolling boil will tear perch flesh off the bones and cloud the cooking liquor you are about to pour over the fish.
- The fishkettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lifting rack, sized to hold a whole fish flat. Any wide pan deep enough to take the fish will do, but line it with a doubled strip of parchment or cheesecloth long enough to grip at both ends, which is how you get the fish out intact at the end.
- How much water"A small quantity" suggests enough to come partway up the fish rather than to cover it, an inch or so in the pan. Read that way it is a shallow poach-and-steam, and the liquor stays concentrated enough to be worth serving.
- TimingTen to twelve minutes suits a whole perch of about a pound. For anything larger, count roughly ten minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder; the flesh should be opaque to the backbone and pull cleanly from it.
- Roe and liverLeft in deliberately, both for flavour and because they were eaten. Modern fishmongers gut on sight, so this needs a whole ungutted fish ordered in advance, or simply omit the instruction and accept a slightly leaner result.
- Dutch sauceNineteenth-century English and American cookbooks commonly use "Dutch sauce" for what is now called hollandaise: egg yolks, butter and lemon or vinegar, worked warm. Any standard hollandaise is the intended partner.
- The parsley stepBoiling the parsley until soft before the fish goes in is what gives the liquor its flavour; the recipe sets no time, only the test of softness. Strain it as directed, or the finished plate looks like pond weed.
- YieldOne whole perch of a pound or so feeds one generously or two modestly as a course. Scale the pan and the parsley up rather than crowding two fish into one layer of liquid.
Perch was cheap and abundant in American lakes and rivers, which is part of why a preparation this austere appears in a book from the Waldorf. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms rather than the stoves, assembled his 1896 volume as a working reference covering everything from banquet cookery to plain household fare, and the plain fish poach was a fixture of both. The method itself is much older than the hotel: cooking a whole fish in a short, aromatic liquor and then serving that liquor back over it is the classic French *court-bouillon* technique, reduced here to parsley, salt, pepper and butter. The pairing with a Dutch sauce follows a familiar convention that poached freshwater fish wants an egg-and-butter emulsion rather than a stock-based one.