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Cold Brook Trout, Sauce Siberienne
Cut off fins with scissors, draw and neatly wipe three medium brook trout, place in a frying pan with half-gill white wine, tablespoon vinegar, juice of half a sound lemon, two gills water, two branches parsley and half teaspoon salt. Cover fish with buttered paper and gently boil on the fire fifteen minutes. Remove and let cool off in the same pan. Dress trout on a cold dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six cleaned leaves fresh lettuce and serve with a Siberienne sauce, separately.
A cold poached trout in the classic style: a short acidulated court bouillon, cooling in its own liquor, and a cold sauce passed separately. The hinge is heat control — the original says "gently boil," which in a modern pan means barely a tremble.
- The liquid, convertedA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of white wine is 4 tablespoons; two gills of water is 1 cup. With the vinegar and lemon that gives roughly 1½ cups of court bouillon, enough to come partway up three trout in a wide pan rather than to submerge them.
- "Gently boil" means do not boilHold the liquid where the surface only shivers, around 160–180°F. Trout of this size will usually be done well short of the full fifteen minutes; cook to an internal temperature of 145°F at the thickest part, where the flesh just parts from the backbone. A hard boil risks bursting the skin and drying the flesh.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the fish so the exposed top stays moist. Parchment does the job; foil works but should not touch an acidic liquid for long.
- Cool in the liquorThe instruction to let the fish cool in the same pan is not laziness: the trout finishes on residual heat and stays moist in its seasoned liquid rather than drying as it cools. Get it into the refrigerator within a couple of hours and eat within two days.
- "Draw" the fishGut it; the gills are usually taken out at the same time. Trout is commonly sold already gutted; ask for the head left on if you want the classic presentation, and scrape the body cavity clean of any dark membrane.
- Brook troutSalvelinus fontinalis, a char rather than a true trout, and mainly a sport fish now. Farmed rainbow trout of the same size behaves identically in a court bouillon. Wild-caught fish is subject to local season and size rules.
- The sauce is elsewhereNo sauce Siberienne is given here; the recipe assumes it is to be found elsewhere in the book. Sauces of this family in the period were generally cold mayonnaise-type bases sharpened with mustard and horseradish, sometimes with caviar, though the exact formula for Siberienne is not fixed. Any cold mustard-and-horseradish mayonnaise will suit the dish.
- YieldThree trout serve three as a main course, or six as a first course if split and boned. The folded napkin on the platter is there to absorb draining liquid, and can be skipped without harm.
This is Delmonico's cooking written down for the household reader, in a manner often associated with Alexander Filippini, long the chef of that New York restaurant, who compiled his international collections in the decades around 1900; the short telegraphic style — cut, draw, wipe, dress — is the language of a professional kitchen rather than a farm cookbook. Cold poached fish with a cold sauce served apart was often served as part of a formal dinner or at a summer buffet, and the folded napkin under the fish was a service convention of the era, meant to catch moisture and lift the presentation. The name of the sauce belongs to the same fashion that produced sauce russe and salade russe: garnishes labelled Russian or Siberian in French kitchens generally signalled caviar or horseradish, or both, and the attribution is culinary shorthand rather than any documented Siberian original.