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Pickled Carp
After cleaning a carp make as small an opening as possible, tie up the head, put the fish in a fish kettle, pour over boiling vinegar, and after a few minutes add a tumblerful of red wine, and a seasoning of two carrots and three onions cut into slices, and a small quantity each of sage, thyme, laurel leaves, parsley, cloves and garlic, and then set the kettle on the fire and allow it to simmer gently for an hour. Let the fish remain in this until it is quite cold, when it will be ready to serve.
A whole carp poached in a hot vinegar bath and left to cool in it — a cold soused fish in the central European manner rather than a preserve. A few of Oscar's assumptions need spelling out.
- The hinge: cool it in the liquorThe recipe has the fish stay in the bath until quite cold, so it goes on taking up the flavour of the acidulated liquor as it cools. Lifting it out hot will leave it blander and more likely to break up.
- A fish kettleA long, lidded pan with a perforated lift-out rack, sized to hold a whole fish flat and just covered by liquid. A roasting pan with a rack, covered in foil, does the same job; the rack matters because a poached carp cannot be lifted by hand without collapsing.
- TumblerfulRoughly 8 fl oz of red wine. The vinegar quantity is left open; as written the recipe pours over boiling vinegar alone, with no water. Straight vinegar in the volume needed to cover a whole fish is punishing, and diluting it with two or three parts water is one way to temper it.
- Laurel leavesBay leaves. Two or three for a fish of this size; the herbs here are a bouquet, not a marinade, and heavy handedness with sage will dominate everything.
- "As small an opening as possible"The carp is gutted through a short slit and the head tied to the body with kitchen string so the fish keeps its shape through an hour of simmering. Scale it thoroughly — carp scales are large and tenacious — and scrub the belly cavity.
- Simmering an hourLong by modern reckoning for a whole fish held below the boil, which will generally be done sooner; the recipe gives no weight. Fillets would need only a few minutes in the same bath.
- The fish itselfFarmed carp is sold live or whole at Asian and eastern European markets and is bonier than many cooks expect, with a row of fine Y-bones along the flank. Muddiness is a function of the water it was raised in rather than the species; a sharp vinegar bath would plausibly have helped mask it.
- Keeping and servingThis is a dish for the next day or two under refrigeration, not a pickle in the shelf-stable sense: there is no measured salt or acid balance for keeping. Serve it cold with some of the strained vegetables, brown bread and horseradish. The recipe gives no yield, but a whole carp will serve several.
Carp cooked in vinegar and wine and eaten cold belongs to a broad central and eastern European tradition — the German Karpfen blau, the Polish and Czech Christmas Eve carp, the Jewish sweet-and-sour carp of Alsace and the Rhineland — all of which rest on the same idea that an acid bath firms the flesh, sets the skin and tempers a fish with a reputation for mud. Carp was a monastic and pond-farmed fish for centuries in Europe, valued precisely because it could be kept alive in stew ponds and killed to order, which is why it turns up so often on fast-day and holiday tables. Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen in the 1890s cooked for a New York clientele that included a large and prosperous German-speaking population, and the book carries a good many such dishes alongside the French repertoire. The instruction to tie up the head and keep the opening small is standard whole-fish handling, the aim being that the carp arrives at the table intact.