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Brook Trout, Biarritz
Remove fins, draw by the gills and neatly wipe three very fresh brook trout. Make a spiral incision from head to tail on both sides of each fish. Place in a sautoire, spread a maitre d'hotel butter and half a teaspoon of anchovy essence over, season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, moisten with half gill white wine. Cover with buttered paper, then set in oven thirty minutes, occasionally basting meanwhile. Remove, lift them with a skimmer, dress on a dish. Prepare a Hollandaise sauce. Pour into the sauce a tablespoon of the fish liquor; mix well. Pour sauce over the trout. Sprinkle a very little chopped truffle over and serve.
A straightforward baked trout dressed with hollandaise, written for a kitchen where terms like sautoire and saltspoon needed no explanation. The one thing to fix is the cooking time.
- Thirty minutes is far too longThirty minutes is long -- small pan-sized brook trout will usually be cooked through in well under half that time in a moderate oven; the flesh should just part from the backbone. Check early rather than trusting the stated time, whatever the basting.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350-375F, with the buttered paper pressed directly onto the fish to hold in steam.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided sauté pan. Any ovenproof skillet or small roasting pan that holds the three fish in one layer without crowding will do.
- Half a gill of wineA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of dry white wine. Three saltspoons of pepper is about 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for three fish.
- Maitre d'hotel butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. About 3 tablespoons total, softened, is right for three trout; make it ahead and let it firm up so it spreads rather than melts off.
- Anchovy essenceThe Victorian bottled version was a thin salted anchovy extract. A half teaspoon of anchovy paste loosened with a little water, or two mashed oil-packed fillets, gives the same savoury undertone.
- Adding the fish liquorWhisk in the tablespoon of pan juices off the heat and add it warm, not hot. Hollandaise carries very little spare liquid before it thins or breaks, so stop at the one spoonful the recipe specifies.
- The spiral incisionRead this as shallow cuts curving from head to tail on each side. Keeping them to the skin rather than into the muscle helps the seasoned butter reach the flesh and keeps the fish from breaking up when lifted with the skimmer.
- Truffle and yieldThree trout serve three as a main course. The chopped truffle is a garnish of a teaspoon or less; without it the dish is unharmed, and a scatter of chives is more honest than truffle oil.
Nineteenth-century restaurant cooking named dishes after places as a shorthand for a treatment, and Biarritz — the Basque resort on the Atlantic that became fashionable under Napoleon III's court in the 1850s and 60s — is often said to have lent its name to fish and egg preparations, though the label functions loosely. The pairing here is characteristic of the period rather than of the town: a freshwater fish given a salt-sea accent with anchovy, then finished with hollandaise and truffle, the two luxuries that signalled a dish had been assembled by a trained kitchen. Brook trout appears throughout books of this kind because it came in small and very fresh. The instruction to draw the fish through the gills — leaving the belly uncut — is the classic handling for small trout, keeping the body intact so it holds its shape on the serving dish.