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Carp, Sauce Genevoise
Scale, trim the fins and neatly wipe a three to three-and-a-half pound carp. Place in a large saucepan one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, one sliced leek, two branches parsley, one bay leaf, one sprig thyme, two cloves, a gill vinegar, one gallon water and a tablespoon salt; boil for fifteen minutes, then add the fish. Cover the pan and let simmer for forty minutes. Lift up the carp with two skewers, place on a large hot dish, drain the water from the dish, and if any of the vegetables, etc., adhere to the fish also remove them. Pour a Genevoise sauce over the fish and serve.
A whole carp poached in a vegetable court bouillon and sauced with a red-wine reduction. The court bouillon and the sauce are two separate operations, and the recipe assumes you already know the second one.
- A gill of vinegarA gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American measure, 5 fl oz in British usage. Either way, against a gallon of water that is a mild acidulation, enough to firm the flesh and keep the skin from splitting.
- Cut the poaching timeForty minutes at a simmer will leave a 3 lb carp dry and cottony. Fish is done at 145F at the thickest part of the back, which on a fish this size takes roughly 20 to 25 minutes in liquid held just below a tremble. Start checking at 18 minutes.
- Boil the aromatics firstThe fifteen-minute preliminary boil is the point of the recipe, not padding. It turns water into a court bouillon; slide the fish in only after the vegetables have given up their flavour, then drop the heat so the surface barely moves.
- The sauce is elsewhere in the bookThe sauce is not given here -- Sauce genevoise is a red-wine sauce: a fish fumet or the poaching liquor reduced hard with red wine and a mirepoix, thickened on a brown sauce or roux base, strained, and finished off the heat with butter and a little anchovy. Add the butter off the heat or it will break.
- Carp needs handlingFarmed carp can carry a muddy flavour from the skin and the dark strip of flesh along the lateral line. Scale thoroughly, scrub the skin, and lift that dark layer away when you portion it. A day in cold water in the refrigerator, changed once, helps.
- Lifting it outTwo skewers pushed through the fish will work but risk tearing it. A double layer of cheesecloth laid in the pan before the fish goes in makes a sling and lets you move it to the platter in one piece.
- Yield and serviceA 3 to 3.5 lb carp serves four generously, or six as part of a larger meal. Plain boiled potatoes suit it, since the sauce is rich and dark.
Sauce genevoise is generally traced to Geneva, though the name is also held to be a corruption of "genoise" (Genoa), and it is traditionally associated with the freshwater fish of the lake and the Rhone -- trout, salmon, pike -- served in a dark reduction of red wine rather than the white-wine sauces used for sea fish. By the time this book was compiled the sauce had been fixed in the French repertoire and was applied to any large river fish, carp included. Carp itself was for centuries among the most managed fish in Europe: bred in monastic and manorial ponds precisely because it survives being kept alive and transported, which made it the reliable fish for fast days and, in central and eastern Europe, the Christmas Eve table. Its reputation for muddiness is a consequence of that pond life, and purging it in clean water before cooking was a common precaution.