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Stewed Carp
Take a large carp, cut out the gills, but do not remove the tongue; then make as small an opening in the under edge as possible in order to open it, and wash it out thoroughly. Boil one-half pint of vinegar, and when it is boiling pour it over the fish that the scales may drop off easily. Wrap the carp in a cloth and stew it in a court bouillon. When done drain it and serve with capers and anchovy sauce, or without sauce after soup.
A late-nineteenth-century poached carp, written for a kitchen that expected to receive the fish whole and alive. Most of the instructions are about handling, not cooking, and the cooking itself is a gentle poach that takes far less time than the word "stew" suggests.
- Never let it boilA court bouillon for whole fish is best held at around 160-170F, barely trembling. Actual boiling splits the skin and wrings out the flesh.
- Court bouillonNot named or specified here; the reader is assumed to know it: water with white wine or vinegar, sliced onion and carrot, parsley stems, thyme, bay, peppercorns and salt, simmered 20-30 minutes before the fish goes in. Enough to cover the carp completely.
- Half a pint of vinegarOne cup. It is poured boiling over the fish purely to loosen the scales, not to flavour anything; the fish is scaled and rinsed before it goes into the bouillon.
- ScalingCarp scales are large and firmly set, and the boiling-vinegar trick works, but a fishmonger will scale and gut the fish in seconds. If you are buying it cleaned, skip the vinegar step entirely.
- The small openingGutting through a minimal slit keeps a whole poached fish from gaping open at the table, which is probably the point of the instruction. The tongue may be left in for the same presentational reason, though the recipe does not say why.
- TimingFigure roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point once the liquid is back to a bare simmer; a 3-4 lb carp runs 25-35 minutes. It is done when the flesh at the backbone flakes and reaches 145F.
- The clothCheesecloth or a clean linen towel, tied at both ends, lets you lift a cooked whole fish out in one piece. A long strip of cheesecloth under the fish in the pan does the same job with less fuss.
- SauceAnchovy sauce in this period generally means a bechamel or butter sauce sharpened with anchovy essence or mashed fillets; the recipe does not say whether the capers go into the sauce or alongside it. Served "without sauce after soup" means it appears as the fish course, plain, with only the aromatics of the bouillon behind it.
- YieldA 3-4 lb carp serves four as a fish course. Carp is bony along the flanks and muddy if it has come from warm still water; a farmed or winter-caught fish is markedly cleaner in flavour.
Carp was a staple of European tables long before it was an American one, farmed in monastery and manor ponds since the Middle Ages precisely because it survives crowding and transport alive. Its arrival in quantity in the United States is generally traced to federal fish-culture programmes of the 1870s and 1880s, which distributed carp widely as a cheap, hardy food fish; within a generation it was cheap enough to be scorned by fashionable diners, though it remained important in German, Bohemian and Jewish cooking in the eastern cities. That is the context for its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection: the Waldorf kitchen cooked for an international clientele, and a whole carp poached in court bouillon and sent out with capers and anchovy sauce was a Central European dish presented in French dress. The instruction to leave the tongue in and gut through the smallest possible slit belongs to the same tradition of serving the fish whole and handsome, scales loosened with boiling vinegar rather than scraped away with a knife.