No. 1301

Trout, Stuffed

Truites Farcies

Draw four trout by the gills, each fish to weigh half a pound; wipe well the insides, and fill the belly with a paste made of fresh butter, white bread-crumbs, parsley, onion, and mushrooms, all finely chopped. Season, then roll each one in a separate sheet of oiled paper; lay them on a baking dish containing melted butter, and let cook for fifteen to twenty minutes in a moderate oven, turning and basting them frequently. Wrap and dress them on a dish; serve with their own butter, and slices of lemon ranged around in a circle.

← No. 1300 Trout, Lausanne Style Salmon & Trout No. 1302 Salmon Trout-a l'Antoinette →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook who already knows how to bone and dress fish, so the instructions are terse. The points below fill in the numbers he leaves out.

Drawing by the gillsThis means gutting the fish through the gill opening and vent rather than slitting the belly, so the body stays a closed pocket for the stuffing. A modern fishmonger will slit the belly by default; ask for the fish to be gilled and gutted whole, or use belly-slit trout and simply close them with a toothpick or a turn of kitchen twine.
Moderate ovenRanhofer gives no figure; a moderate oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. At half a pound each the fish are small and the paper parcels hold steam, so 15-20 minutes is realistic. Cook until the flesh is opaque at the backbone; modern food-safety guidance for fish is 145F.
Oiled paperNineteenth-century kitchens brushed plain white paper with oil or clarified butter to keep it from sticking and scorching. Parchment does the same job with no oiling.
Turning and bastingWrapped fish cannot be basted in the usual sense; what is meant is turning the parcels in the melted butter in the dish so the paper stays soaked and the outside colours evenly. Ranhofer asks for this frequently over the cooking time.
The stuffing proportionsNo quantities are given. For four half-pound trout, roughly 4 oz softened butter, 1 cup fresh white breadcrumbs, a small onion, 3-4 oz mushrooms and a good handful of parsley, all chopped fine, will fill them with a little to spare. Sweat the onion and mushrooms first if you want the raw allium edge gone; the short bake will not cook them through otherwise.
"Wrap and dress them"Read this as unwrap. The parcels are opened, the fish lifted onto the serving dish, and the butter that has collected in the paper and baking dish poured over.
SeasonRanhofer's blanket "season" is to be read as salt and pepper. Salt the cavities as well as the paste.
YieldFour fish, one per person as a fish course. As a main course with potatoes, it serves two to three.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked in some three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and its fish chapters lean heavily on French technique. Cooking small whole fish en papillote - sealed in oiled paper - was a standard French method well before Ranhofer, valued because the paper traps the aromatic steam of the stuffing rather than letting it escape into the oven. The farce here, butter bound with breadcrumbs and sharpened with parsley, onion and mushroom, is a plain version of the duxelles-style forcemeats that run through the book. Trout were a fashionable item on New York menus in this period.