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Potted Trout
Clean one dozen or so of small trout, wash well, dry on a cloth, sprinkle them over with one ounce of white pepper, half that quantity of powdered cloves, one-fourth ounce of cayenne and a small quantity of mace. Put the trout, backs downward, into an earthenware jar or pot, pour over two pounds or so of clarified butter, place the jar in a slack oven and bake for about four hours. When done take it out and the fish are ready for use.
A confit in all but name: whole small trout submerged in butter and held at low heat for hours. The technique is sound, but the spice quantities and the storage assumptions both need attention.
- Slack ovenA slack or cool oven is roughly 250-300F in modern terms. The point is not to brown anything but to hold the butter well below a simmer so the fish poaches in fat without frying.
- Four hours is deliberateSmall trout are cooked through in fifteen minutes. The long hold is what softens the fine bones and lets the spiced butter penetrate, in the manner of a confit. Shorter baking gives you buttered fish, not potted fish.
- Scale the spices downOne ounce of white pepper is about four tablespoons, and a quarter ounce of cayenne about a tablespoon and a half. Even for a dozen fish this is fierce by current palates; a third of the stated amounts produces a well-seasoned result. Mace is the outer covering of nutmeg and is milder and less resinous than the seed.
- Clarified butterTwo pounds is about four cups. It must be clarified, not whole butter: the milk solids left in whole butter scorch at length and spoil quickly. Ghee works directly.
- Backs downwardThat is, bellies up, so the open cavities fill with butter rather than trapping air. Pack the fish snugly in a single layer or two and make sure every one is fully covered.
- The jarPotting jars of the period were often straight-sided earthenware. Any deep ovenproof dish or small Dutch oven serves. Put a cold stoneware jar into a cold oven and let both come up together to avoid cracking it.
- Storage is the real issueA butter seal is not preservation. Fish held under fat at room temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without oxygen and gives no smell or taste warning. Refrigerate the potted trout and eat within three or four days; do not keep it in the larder as the original household would have.
- Yield and servingA dozen small trout feeds eight to twelve as a first course. Serve cold or barely warm with the set butter, toast and lemon; lift the fish out with the spiced butter clinging to them.
Potting was the standard English answer to a glut of small fish long before canning: cook it in spiced butter, cover it with more butter, and the fat excludes air. Potted char from the lakes of Westmorland was a celebrated luxury sent to London in decorated ceramic pots through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and potted trout, shrimp and salmon all followed the same method. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen was built on European domestic technique as much as on grand-hotel invention -- this is a cold larder preparation, useful for the buffet and the supper table, of the sort a large hotel could make in quantity on a slow afternoon. The style survives on modern menus as potted shrimp and as duck confit, both descendants of the same idea that fat is both a cooking medium and a lid.