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Broiled Trout (Clean a trout wipe it)
Clean a trout, wipe it carefully, tie it up into shape, cover it over with one tablespoonful of salt, mixed with four or five ounces of butter, and let it remain for three minutes. Then place it on a gridiron, over a clear fire, and broil it gently for fifteen minutes or so. Chop up a well-washed and boned anchovy, stir it up with a little melted butter in a saucepan, add one tablespoonful of capers, one dessertspoonful of vinegar, and a little salt, pepper and nutmeg. When done, put the trout on a dish; boil the sauce for two or three minutes, pour it over the fish and serve at once.
A plain grilled trout with an anchovy-caper butter, written for a coal grate and a hinged gridiron. The method transfers to a charcoal grill or an overhead broiler with almost no change; the timings and the salt need attention.
- The salt is a coating, not a seasoningThe salt is heavy-handed -- A tablespoon of salt worked into four or five ounces of butter and smeared over one fish is far more of both than a single trout needs. For one trout, use about a teaspoon of salt and two tablespoons of softened butter, and let the fish sit the three minutes as directed.
- Gridiron over a clear fire"Clear fire" means coals burned down past the smoking stage with no flame. On a charcoal grill that is a bed of grey-ashed coals; under a domestic broiler, the top rack with the element fully preheated. Oil the bars well or the skin will weld to them.
- Fifteen minutes is too longFifteen minutes is long by modern standards -- A farmed trout of 10-12 oz is cooked through in roughly 4-5 minutes a side; standard food-safety guidance is 145F at the thickest part behind the head, though many cooks pull it lower. The fifteen minutes suits a larger fish than the pan-size trout sold today; the recipe does not say what size the author had in mind.
- Tying up into shapeThe recipe says only to tie the fish up into shape; the usual purpose was to keep it intact so it could be turned on the gridiron without breaking. A modern fish basket does the same job; otherwise leave the trout straight and turn it once, with two spatulas.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. It sits between the teaspoon and the tablespoon and appears throughout Victorian and Edwardian recipe writing.
- The anchovyOscar means a whole salt-packed anchovy, which is why he says washed and boned. Two rinsed oil-packed fillets, chopped fine, give the equivalent. They should melt into the butter over low heat rather than fry.
- Do not really boil the sauceTwo or three minutes at a boil will separate melted butter. Warm the anchovy, capers, vinegar and seasoning through until the anchovy has dissolved, keep it moving, and pour it over the fish at once.
- YieldOne trout, one diner. Scale the sauce by roughly two anchovy fillets and two tablespoons of butter per fish.
Oscar Tschirky was never actually the Waldorf's chef -- he was its maître d'hôtel -- but his 1896 book collected the hotel's working repertoire, and this trout is a fair sample of it: a French-trained kitchen cooking in an English idiom for American diners. The anchovy-and-caper butter belongs to the British tradition of anchovy sauce for fish, a family of preparations that goes back to the eighteenth century and survived into the twentieth as bottled anchovy essence. Trout was a fashionable fish on American hotel menus of the period. Broiling on a gridiron over a clear fire was normal practice in coal-range kitchens of the 1890s.