Home › The World's Kitchen › Brook Trout, Cauterets
Brook Trout, Cauterets
Trim, draw by the gills and wipe three medium very fresh brook trout. Place in a bowl a half ounce butter, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, one branch chopped chervil, one teaspoon anchovy paste and juice of a quarter lemon. Mix all well together and equally divide it in the inside of the three trout, arrange them in a frying pan, season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons of white pepper, add half ounce good butter, a half gill white wine, juice of a quarter lemon and six minced shallots. Cover with a lightly buttered paper, set in oven thirty minutes, remove and dress on a dish. Mix in a small saucepan one tablespoon butter with two tablespoons flour, heat for half a minute, then strain the fish liquor into this pan; add a half gill hot milk and mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then let boil eight minutes, occasionally mixing. Dilute an egg yolk with two tablespoons cream, add to the sauce, mixing while heating one minute longer, strain over fish and serve.
A whole-fish preparation from the era when a small pan of fish went into the oven under buttered paper rather than under a lid. The sauce is the fussy part: it is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, and it will curdle if you let it boil after the yolk goes in.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the egg yolk and cream go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. Heat it a minute, no more, stirring constantly; if it boils the yolk scrambles and no amount of straining will save the texture.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 1/4 cup — that applies to both the white wine and the milk. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper for three small fish. That is aggressive by current taste; a half teaspoon is plenty.
- Ounces of butterA half ounce of butter is one tablespoon. The recipe calls for it twice — once in the stuffing, once in the pan.
- Oven heat and timeThe recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. Thirty minutes will overcook trout of the size most fishmongers sell; medium brook trout of 8 to 10 ounces are done in 15 to 20 minutes, when the flesh at the backbone just parts. Check at 15.
- Draw by the gillsThis means gutting the fish through the gill opening rather than slitting the belly, so the cavity stays closed around the butter stuffing. If your fish are already belly-split, stuff them anyway and lay them cut side down.
- The paperA buttered round of parchment laid directly on the fish — a cartouche — lets steam escape while keeping the surface from drying. Foil traps too much moisture and the fish poaches rather than bakes.
- Sauce proportionsTwo tablespoons flour to one of butter is a dry, flour-heavy roux, and the pan liquor plus 1/4 cup milk will make a very thick sauce that then boils eight minutes. Use equal butter and flour, and thin with extra hot milk or a little fish stock until it coats a spoon.
- Chervil and anchovyChervil is worth seeking out for its faint anise note; flat parsley with a pinch of tarragon is the usual substitute. Anchovy paste in a tube works exactly as intended here — it dissolves into the butter and reads as depth, not as fish.
- YieldThree trout, three servings, with a first-course portion of sauce each.
Cauterets is a spa town in the Hautes-Pyrénées, at the head of a valley of cold mountain streams, and it was known as a thermal resort when Alexander Filippini compiled The International Cook Book (1906). Dishes in the grand-hotel repertoire were often named for the place whose local product they used, and here the marker is likely the trout itself: small, very fresh, cooked whole with butter and a little white wine rather than sauced heavily. The anchovy paste in the stuffing is a characteristically nineteenth-century French touch — anchovy was used the way cooks now use a splash of fish sauce, for savour rather than for any recognisable taste of anchovy. The finish is a velouté enriched with egg yolk and cream, a liaison classically associated with sauce allemande, and Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, applied it to fish entries in this book.