Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Boiled Trout
Boiled Trout
Scale and clean three or four large trout, place them in a saucepan, pour over two breakfast cupfuls of boiling vinegar, which will have the effect of turning them blue, and an equal quantity of white wine, and pour over sufficient water to cover them. Add one onion, stuck with cloves, one carrot, half a bunch of celery, four or five bay leaves, a small bunch of parsley, one teaspoonful of pepper corns and salt to suit the taste; set the saucepan over the fire and boil for about fifteen minutes, with the cover on. When done, remove the fish, drain them, place them on a folded napkin spread on a dish, garnish with parsley, and serve with oil and vinegar, or any fish sauce, in a sauceboat.
This is truite au bleu under a plain English name, and almost everything that matters is in the handling of the fish rather than the seasoning of the liquid.
- The blue depends on the fishTrout only turn blue if they are killed and gutted at the last moment and the natural slime coat on the skin is left intact — the acid reacts with it. A rinsed, chilled, market-bought trout will simply cook grey. Do not scrub or wipe the skin if you want the colour, and skip the scaling step for trout, whose scales are fine enough to eat.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup runs 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read "two breakfast cupfuls" as roughly 2 cups of vinegar and 2 cups of white wine. That is a sharp bath; a milder result comes from cutting the vinegar to about a cup and making up the difference with water.
- Fifteen minutes is too longA whole trout of 10 to 12 ounces is done in 5 to 8 minutes in barely trembling liquid, a larger one in 10. The flesh should just part from the backbone. Fifteen minutes at a boil, as the recipe directs, will split the skin and leave the fish woolly.
- Poach, do not boilBring the court bouillon to the boil first, then slide the fish in and drop the heat so the surface only shivers. Hard boiling batters the trout apart, and the recipe's covered pan makes it easy to overshoot.
- Make the court bouillon in advanceThe onion stuck with cloves, carrot, celery, bay, parsley and peppercorns want 20 to 30 minutes of simmering on their own to give anything up. Added at the same moment as the fish, they contribute almost nothing in the few minutes the trout needs.
- Four or five bay leavesThat quantity suits modern dried Turkish bay only if the leaves are old and faded. With fresh leaves or potent California bay, two is plenty.
- The napkinThe folded napkin is a period serving device that wicks away poaching liquid so the platter does not flood. A folded kitchen towel does the same job; drain the fish well and it is optional.
- Yield and sauceThree or four trout serve three or four as a main course. "Oil and vinegar" here means a plain vinaigrette; hollandaise, beurre blanc or melted butter with lemon all suit the fish better than another dose of acid.
Boiling trout in a vinegar-heavy court bouillon is the classic Swiss, Austrian and German treatment known as Blaue Forelle or, in French kitchens, truite au bleu, and its whole point is theatrical: the acid reacting with the mucus on a just-killed fish throws the skin a slate blue. In Europe it was associated with inns and hotels built beside trout streams, where a live tank made the trick reliable. Its appearance in an American hotel cookbook of this period says something about both a Continental hotel repertoire and the state of the American fish trade — the recipe is printed matter-of-factly, without any note that a fish shipped on ice will not turn blue at all. The dish is given an unromantic English title, "Boiled Trout," which is how a good deal of French and German hotel cookery arrived on American menus.