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Broiled Trout with Bacon
Wash and clean a trout well, slit it down the belly and remove the backbone. Put a strip of bacon in place of the bone, tie the fish into its original shape, place it on a gridiron over a clear fire and broil it. When done place it on a dish, garnish with fried parsley and serve.
A whole boned trout with a bacon strip in place of the spine, cooked over live coals. The technique survives intact; only the equipment needs translating.
- Boning the fishSlitting down the belly and lifting out the backbone leaves the two fillets joined at the back skin — a butterflied trout. Snip the spine at head and tail with kitchen shears and it pulls free with most of the pin bones attached.
- A clear fireThat means charcoal or hardwood burned down to grey-ashed coals with no flame and no smoke. Trout skin scorches fast, so a medium bed rather than a roaring one; a gas grill at medium-high does the same work.
- The gridironA hinged fish basket is the practical modern equivalent. Oil the bars well and heat them before the fish goes on, or the skin will weld to the metal and tear when you turn it.
- TyingTwo or three loops of cotton butcher's twine around the reassembled fish hold the bacon in and stop the fillets flapping open. Cut and remove the twine before serving.
- Bacon choiceBacon of the period was typically dry-cured and smoked, and often sold in slabs to be sliced by the cook. Use a thin streaky rasher, not thick-cut, so it renders through in the same time the fish takes.
- TimingA 10-12 oz trout needs roughly 4-5 minutes a side over medium coals; it is done when the flesh at the thickest point is opaque and lifts from the skin. The recipe gives no cooking time.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs of curly parsley, thoroughly dried, dropped into 350F fat for 15-20 seconds until they stop sputtering and turn a deep green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so blot it first.
- YieldThe recipe is written for a single trout and gives no yield; count one fish per person. Nothing more elaborate is needed — the bacon has already seasoned the interior.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 Cook Book is a vast compendium of what a first-class American hotel kitchen was expected to turn out. Broiled trout belonged squarely to the sporting side of that menu: brook trout were a prized freshwater catch in the Adirondacks and Catskills, and hotel guests who had not caught them themselves still ate them in the idiom of the camp — split, boned, laid over coals. Substituting bacon for the backbone solves a real problem, since a lean trout dries out over direct heat and the rendering fat bastes it from the inside. Fried parsley as a garnish was standard in professional kitchens of the period and turns up in Oscar's book; it fell out of fashion in the twentieth century.