No. 828

Trout Fried and Marinated—Small

Petites Truites Frites et Marinees

Select some fresh trout, empty and wipe well; salt over, dip in flour and fry in oil a few at a time, then drain and lay them in a deep dish. Heat some oil in a saucepan, mix with it a quarter as much vinegar as water, thyme, bay leaf, basil, sliced onions and cloves; cook this marinade half an hour on a very slow fire and let it get partly cold, then pour it over the fish and leave to marinate for six hours before serving. Dress them on a dish with a little of their marinade and some slices of lemon.

← No. 827 Toasted Bread Garnished with Chicken, Bacon,Cold Side Dishes No. 829 Trout Marinated in Wine-Small →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is escabeche under a French name: small whole trout fried crisp, then steeped in a cooked, aromatic vinegar-and-oil marinade and served cold. The frying and the marinade both matter, but the hinge is that the fish must be well drained and the marinade only partly cooled before it goes on.

The marinade ratio is ambiguous"A quarter as much vinegar as water" reads as one part vinegar to four parts water, with the heated oil as the third element; Ranhofer gives no volumes. A workable reading for four small trout is about 1 cup oil, 1 cup water and 1/4 cup wine vinegar, adjusted so the liquid nearly covers the fish.
Fish size"Small trout" here means pan-size fish of roughly 8-10 inches, 6-8 oz each, fried whole with head on. Farmed rainbow trout of that size are the closest modern equivalent; fillets will fall apart during the six-hour steep.
Frying temperatureOil at 350-375F, a few fish at a time as the recipe insists, so the temperature does not crash. The flour coating should set to a firm crust, since it has to survive hours in acid without turning to paste.
Drain thoroughlyAny frying oil left clinging thins the marinade and makes the finished dish greasy on the palate when cold. Drain on a rack, not on the plate they will sit in.
Cooking the marinadeHalf an hour on a very slow fire is not a reduction; it is an infusion, meant to soften the onion and draw out the thyme, bay, basil and clove without boiling off the vinegar. Keep it at a bare shiver.
"Partly cold"Ranhofer gives no temperature; read it as warm but no longer hot. Boiling marinade poured over fried fish will steam the crust off; fully cold marinade penetrates poorly.
Where it marinatesThe six-hour steep would have been done in a cool larder. Marinate in the refrigerator, covered, and take the dish out 20-30 minutes before serving so the oil is not cloudy and the aromatics read.
ClovesWhole cloves, two or three at most for this quantity. Ground clove will muddy the marinade and dominate the basil.
Yield and keepingFour trout serve four as a cold first course. The dish improves on the second day and will keep three or four days refrigerated; the flesh firms and the flavour deepens as it sits.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a nearly complete record of the restaurant's repertoire, and its "Cold Side Dishes" chapter is full of things that could be made in advance and held in a cool larder for buffets, suppers and hotel service. Fish fried and then steeped in a hot vinegar marinade is one of the oldest preserving techniques in the Mediterranean kitchen, known as escabeche in Spain and scapece or carpione in Italy, and generally traced back through medieval Iberian cookery to Arab practice; the acid and oil together kept cooked fish sound for several days before refrigeration and gave it a flavour worth having in its own right. The French kitchen absorbed it as poisson mariné, and Ranhofer places two versions side by side here, one on vinegar and the next (No. 829) on wine.