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Brook Trout, Genevoise
Neatly trim the fins of three medium brook trout and pull out the intestines at the gills. Place in a frying pan with half ounce butter, one branch parsley, juice of a quarter lemon, a half gill white wine, half teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the fish with a lightly buttered paper, let boil for five minutes on range, then set in oven twenty minutes. Remove, carefully lift up with a skimmer, dress on a hot dish, pour a Genevoise sauce over them, arrange six heart-shaped croutons around fish and serve.
A straightforward braise in the French manner — the fish cooks in its own steam under a paper lid — with everything riding on a separate sauce the recipe assumes you already have. Read the sauce entry before you start.
- Half a gill of white wineA gill is half a cup, so this is about 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). It is a braising liquid, not a poaching bath; the fish should sit in it, not swim.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe uses no oven term that can be converted. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for finishing fish that has already come to a boil on the range.
- The twenty minutes is too longFive minutes on the range plus twenty in the oven will dry out three medium brook trout past saving. Give them five on the stovetop and eight to twelve in the oven, and pull them when the flesh at the thickest point flakes cleanly from the bone, around 140-145F.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down, resting directly on the fish. It keeps the surface moist and concentrates the liquid. Foil is not the same thing — it seals rather than breathes.
- Gutting at the gillsDrawing the fish through the gill opening keeps the belly intact so it holds its shape on the plate. If your fish is not sold this way, ask, or do it yourself with a finger and a hooked skewer. Ordinary belly-gutted trout will taste the same but sit less handsomely.
- Half a teaspoon of white pepperHeavy for three small fish by modern palates, and white pepper from a jar is more assertive than it looks. A quarter teaspoon is closer to the mark unless the pepper is old.
- Genevoise sauceNot made here — it is a separate classical preparation of red wine reduced with mirepoix and fish trimmings, thickened with a brown roux or espagnole and finished with butter and anchovy. Have it made and warm before the trout go in the oven, since the fish will not wait.
- Heart-shaped croutonsBread cut into small hearts and fried in clarified butter until crisp, points inward around the dish. Purely a garnish of the period; they also soak up the sauce.
- YieldThree trout, three servings, as a course rather than a plated main with sides.
Sauce génevoise is one of the old brown fish sauces of French classical cookery — red wine, fish trimmings and a brown thickening, finished with butter and a note of anchovy — and it was attached above all to salmon and trout. The name points to Geneva and the lake-fish cooking of Savoy, though it is often said among cooks and food writers to be a corruption of génoise, Genoese; neither reading is firmly documented. The fish itself is the American note. Brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, is a char rather than a true trout, native to eastern North America, and small enough that three make a service — exactly the sort of local substitution that turned a French sauce into an international recipe.