Home › Roasts and Second Courses › Trout Lombard
Trout Lombard
(Trota fritta) Clean, scale, wash and wipe the trout. Salt and leave for half an hour. Fill with water half a fishkettle; add half a lemon, two bay-leaves, one carrot light or ten berries of pepper, one onion divided into four parts, salt and three cloves.
When the water is lukewarm, dip in the trout.
Cook on a moderate fire and serve the trout with parsley, slices of lemon and young potatoes boiled. A good fish-sauce ought to accompany it. 176
A plainly written court-bouillon poach, despite the Italian subtitle. The whole trick is heat control: the fish goes into barely warm liquid and should never reach a rolling boil.
- The name contradicts the methodThe Italian gloss reads trota fritta, fried trout, but nothing here is fried. Follow the instructions, which describe poaching in an aromatic broth.
- "One carrot light or ten berries of pepper"This is a printer's garble of something like "one carrot, eight or ten berries of pepper." Read it as one carrot plus eight to ten whole peppercorns.
- Fish kettleA long, narrow, lidded pan with a perforated lifting rack, sized to hold a whole fish straight. A roasting pan on the stovetop works, or wrap the trout in cheesecloth with long ends so it can be lifted out without breaking.
- Moderate fireFor poaching fish, modern practice is to hold the water at roughly 175-180F, with faint movement and no bubbles breaking the surface. A hard boil tears the skin and squeezes the flesh dry.
- TimingThe original gives none. A 10-12 oz trout is done in 8-10 minutes at that temperature; a 2 lb fish in about 15. It is ready when the dorsal fin pulls free and the flesh at the backbone has just turned opaque.
- The half-hour saltingBesides seasoning, salt firms the surface of the flesh, which helps the skin hold together in the water. The recipe does not say so, but the excess can be rinsed off before the fish goes in.
- Build the broth firstThe recipe simply adds the aromatics to the water and puts the trout in once it is lukewarm. Simmering the lemon, bay, carrot, onion, cloves and pepper for 15-20 minutes first and then letting the liquid drop to lukewarm will draw more from them. Either way the fish starts in barely warm liquid, which helps keep the skin from splitting.
- "A good fish-sauce"The book leaves it open. Salsa verde (parsley, capers, anchovy, garlic, oil) or plain melted butter with lemon would suit, as would hollandaise or maltaise.
- YieldOne trout per person, with boiled new potatoes alongside as directed.
This comes from The Italian Cook Book, compiled by Maria Gentile and published in New York in 1919 for an American readership curious about Italian cooking. The title's "Lombard" presumably points north, to Lombardy and the alpine lakes and rivers -- Como, Garda, the Adda -- where trout is a common freshwater fish. The method itself is a court bouillon, a long-established European technique for whole fish: an acidulated, aromatic bath that seasons the flesh while it cooks and can double as the base of a sauce. The mismatch between the heading and the subtitle trota fritta appears to be a slip in the book's translation.