No. 1300

Trout, Lausanne Style

Truites a la Mode de Lausanne

Clean well twelve small trout each weighting four ounces. Fry in butter two ounces of onions and four ounces of mushrooms both finely but separately chopped up; put this into a baking dish lay the fish on top and moisten with white wine; sprinkle over with fresh butter and let cook in a hot oven; as soon as they are done, strain the stock into a saucepan, reduce it with veloute sauce (No. 415) and just when ready to serve, incorporate into the sauce some butter and lemon-juice; strain through a tammy and add chopped parsley; pour it over the trout previously dressed on a dish.

← No. 1299 Trout, Fried-Small Salmon & Trout No. 1301 Trout, Stuffed →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional larder, so the recipe leans on a house velouté and gives no quantities for wine or timing. The technique itself is straightforward oven-braising with a mounted pan sauce.

The hinge: finish the sauce off the heatThe butter and lemon juice go in at the last moment, off the burner, swirled until the sauce is glossy. If it returns to a boil the emulsion breaks and the lemon turns harsh.
Hot ovenRanhofer gives no temperature; "hot oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Four-ounce trout in a shallow dish with wine should be done in roughly 8 to 12 minutes, when the flesh at the backbone has just lost its translucency.
Fish size and countFour-ounce trout are small fish. Farmed rainbow trout commonly run 8-12 oz, so about six of the smaller ones match the 48 oz total here; larger fish need a couple of minutes more.
Velouté, No. 415Ranhofer's velouté is a blond roux built out with white veal or chicken stock and reduced. A fish velouté made with fish fumet suits this dish; the quantity is not given, so make enough to coat twelve small trout and no more.
White wine quantityNot specified. The instruction is only to "moisten," so use just enough dry white to wet the bed and film the dish, keeping the liquor concentrated when reduced.
TammyA tammy is a worsted straining cloth wrung between two people. A fine chinois or a sieve lined with muslin does the same work.
The onion and mushroom bedThe text specifies that the onions and mushrooms are chopped separately, not necessarily fried separately. In practice the mushrooms should give up their water before the fish goes on, or the base will steam the fish rather than season it.
YieldTwelve four-ounce trout will stretch to as many as twelve as a fish course at one fish each, or about six as a main dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its 3,000-odd numbered entries are cross-referenced like a professional manual rather than a household book. Naming a dish "à la mode de Lausanne" places it with the lake fish of the Vaud shore of Lake Geneva, where small trout and perch have long been the local restaurant staple; French and Swiss kitchens of the period attached such regional tags freely, and the label signals a style of treatment more than a documented Lausanne original. The method — a bed of chopped onion and mushroom, white wine, a brief pass through a hot oven, then the cooking liquor reduced into velouté and mounted with butter and lemon — is the classical vin blanc fish preparation that runs through nineteenth-century French practice, and it is repeated with small variations across the salmon and trout section of this book.