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Cold Brook Trout, Green Sauce
Clip off fins with scissors, draw and neatly wipe three medium, fresh brook trout. Place in a frying pan with half gill white wine, a tablespoon good vinegar, juice of half a sound lemon, one and a half gills water, two branches parsley and half teaspoon salt. Cover with buttered paper and gently boil on fire fifteen minutes. Remove, let cool off in same pan with broth, dress fish on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with twelve well-cleaned small leaves fresh lettuce around the dish and serve with a green sauce separately.
A cold poached fish in the classic French manner, cooled in its own court bouillon and served with a herb mayonnaise. Two things need attention: the archaic liquid measures and the cooking time.
- The gillA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, and one and a half gills of water is 3/4 cup — enough to come partway up small fish in a wide pan, not to submerge them.
- Cooking timeFifteen minutes at a boil is likely to overcook a medium brook trout. Bring the liquid to a bare shiver, never a rolling boil, and give the fish 8-10 minutes, or until the flesh pulls cleanly from the backbone. Note that standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F at the thickest point; lower finish temperatures are a cook's preference, not a safety recommendation.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish. It keeps the exposed flesh moist and stops it drying where the liquid does not reach.
- Cool in the brothThe instruction to let the fish cool in the same pan with its broth is the hinge of the dish. The trout finishes cooking gently in the residual heat, and leaving it in the liquor keeps it moist rather than dry. Do not lift it out hot.
- The fishTrue brook trout (a char, native to eastern North America) is mostly a sport fish now. Farmed rainbow trout of 8–10 oz each behaves the same way and is what a fishmonger will hand you. "Draw" means gut; ask for them gutted and scaled, heads on for presentation.
- Green sauceMost likely sauce verte: mayonnaise with parsley, tarragon, chervil and spinach or watercress blanched briefly, squeezed dry and pounded or blitzed to a paste, then folded in. Make it the same day and keep it cold.
- The folded napkinA period plating device: fish was commonly dressed on a folded linen napkin, which is usually explained as absorbing the liquid that seeps from cold fish. A bed of the lettuce leaves alone does the same work if you would rather not serve fish on cloth.
- YieldThree trout, three servings as a first or luncheon course. The fish can be poached and cooled a day ahead; make the sauce the day it is served. Bring the fish out of the refrigerator 20 minutes before serving so it is cool rather than cold.
Cold poached fish with a green sauce is a set piece of late nineteenth-century restaurant cooking: the technique is a short court bouillon of wine, vinegar, lemon and herbs, and the accompaniment is sauce verte, mayonnaise tinted and flavoured with blanched green herbs. Serving fish cold was practical as much as fashionable: a dish that could be poached in the morning, cooled in its liquor and dressed on a platter suited the long buffet courses and the hot dining rooms of the period, and it travelled well to picnic and supper tables. Brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, was the prestige small fish of the American Northeast in those decades, taken from cold streams and prized precisely because it was small enough to cook whole and serve one to a person.