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Trout with Remoulade
Select some medium-sized trout and fry them in butter; when cooked place them for a minute on a sheet of kitchen paper, in order to drain off as much of the fat as possible. Chop in moderate quantities some chives, capers, parsley, chervil, watercress and a small quantity of shallots; then pound these in a mortar and mix in one teaspoonful of French mustard, the beaten yolks of two eggs and one teacupful of salad oil. The oil must be mixed in drop by drop, so that it may incorporate thoroughly with the other ingredients. When the sauce is perfectly smooth mix in a small quantity of chili vinegar. Spread an ornamental dish-paper or a folded napkin over a dish, lay the trout on it, garnish round with parsley and serve with the sauce in a sauceboat.
A fried trout with a hand-pounded green mayonnaise — essentially a rémoulade in the older French sense, closer to sauce verte than to the mustardy Louisiana version. The sauce is the whole exercise, and it lives or dies on the emulsion.
- The hinge: the oilHave the yolks and the oil at room temperature, and add the oil literally a few drops at a time until the mixture visibly thickens, only then in a thin stream. If it breaks, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split sauce into it drop by drop.
- A teacupfulIn books of this period a teacupful is usually reckoned at about a gill, 4 fl oz or 120 ml, but the figure is genuinely elastic. Judge by consistency instead: two yolks will carry up to a cup of oil, and you should stop when the sauce mounds on the spoon.
- Chili vinegarA Victorian pantry staple: hot capsicums steeped in vinegar for a week or two. Use a splash of a commercial pepper vinegar, or white wine vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce, added a teaspoon at a time to taste.
- Chervil and watercressChervil is seasonal and fades fast; if unavailable, use tarragon at half the quantity plus extra parsley. Watercress stems are coarse — pick the leaves only, or the pounded sauce turns stringy.
- Mortar or machineA mortar bruises the herbs and releases their oils rather than shredding them, which is why the sauce comes out green and smooth. A small food processor works, but pulse the herbs to a paste before any oil goes in, and finish the emulsion by hand.
- Frying the troutWhole butter over the heat needed to brown a trout will scorch. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and figure roughly 4 minutes a side for a 10–12 oz fish — the flesh should just part from the backbone at the thickest point.
- Kitchen paperNineteenth-century "kitchen paper" was unglazed absorbent stock; paper towels do the same job. The "ornamental dish-paper" for service was a doily-like lace paper, purely decorative — a folded napkin, as Oscar allows, is the practical option.
- Raw yolksThe sauce is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and make it the same day.
- YieldOne trout per person; the quantity of sauce given is comfortable for four to six fish.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a large compendium in 1896, and dishes like this one show the hotel kitchen working in straight French idiom for an American clientele. Rémoulade is generally traced to a northern French dialect word for horseradish or a pungent root, and in the classical repertoire it covered a family of cold mayonnaise-based sauces sharpened with mustard, capers and herbs; the pounded-green version here is close to what other books of the era called sauce verte or sauce ravigote. Trout appeared regularly on fashionable New York menus of the period, and serving a whole fish on a folded napkin with the sauce apart was one of the recognised hotel presentations.