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Brook Trout with White Wine
Carefully draw through the gills three fresh brook trout, clean well and wipe; place in a frying pan with a half ounce butter, two branches parsley, the juice of a quarter lemon, a gill white wine, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Cover with a lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes, then set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, arrange on a hot dish, remove the parsley, pour the gravy over and serve.
A plain poach-then-bake for small whole fish, written when a cook was assumed to know what a buttered paper and a gill were. Two things need attention: the measurements and the total cooking time.
- A gill of wineA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Use a dry white with some acidity; it is the entire sauce here, so it should be something worth drinking.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon. That is a firm amount of pepper for three small fish, and it is meant to be tasted.
- "Frying pan" means oven-safeThe dish goes from the burner straight into the oven, so the pan must be metal all through. A wide sauté pan or a shallow braiser that holds three trout in one layer without crowding.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the side facing the fish, laid directly on the surface. It traps steam and keeps the skin from drying without sealing the pan the way a lid would.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only 'set in the oven'. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern choice.
- Twenty minutes is too longFive minutes of simmering plus twenty in the oven will take a half-pound trout well past done and into cotton. Whole brook trout of 8 to 12 oz need roughly 10 to 12 minutes total; check at the backbone, where the flesh should just release from the bone and read about 145F.
- Drawing through the gillsThe old method of gutting a small fish without slitting the belly, so it holds its shape on the plate. Most trout now come cleaned; if yours does not, an ordinary belly cut is simpler and costs nothing in flavor.
- The "gravy"The pan liquor, not a thickened sauce. Lift the fish out, put the pan back over heat, reduce the wine and juices by half and swirl in a knob of cold butter off the heat before pouring it over.
- Fish and yieldWild brook trout are rarely sold commercially; farmed brook trout, rainbow trout or arctic char of the same size are close substitutes. Three fish, three servings.
Brook trout is not really a trout but a char, native to the cold streams of eastern North America, and its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book reflects the mixing of American ingredients with a French professional repertoire. The technique itself belongs to that repertoire: the fish is cooked au vin blanc under a buttered paper, the shallow-poaching method in which the cooking liquid becomes the sauce, so nothing of the fish is lost. Little is done to the fish here beyond butter, parsley, lemon and wine.