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Baked Salmon Trout
Salmon trout is a fine game fish and is delicious baked with cream gravy. Lay the fish full length, in a baking pan, with just enough water to keep it from scorching. If large, scrape the backbone with a sharp knife. Bake slowly, basting often with butter and water. By the time it is done, have ready in a saucepan a cupful of cream— diluted with a few spoonfuls of hot water, lest it should clot in heating, in which has been stirred cautiously two tablespoonfuls melted butter and a little chopped parsley. Heat this in a double boiler, add the gravy from the dripping pan, boil up once, and when the trout is laid in a hot dish, pour the sauce around it. Garnish with a wreath of crimson nasturtium-blooms and dainty sprigs of parsley, on the edge of the dish.
A whole baked fish with a warm cream sauce, written for a cook who could judge doneness by eye. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the fish itself, and the fact that the sauce is finished at the last minute.
- What the fish is"Salmon trout" was applied loosely in nineteenth-century American books to lake trout, large sea-run brook trout and steelhead — a pink- or orange-fleshed trout of some size. A whole 3-5 lb steelhead, char or farmed rainbow trout stands in exactly; so does a piece of salmon fillet, though a whole fish is what the presentation assumes.
- "Bake slowly"Read this as 300-325F. The low heat matters: a cream sauce alongside a fish cooked hard and fast has nothing to balance, and a whole fish at high heat dries at the shoulders before the belly is warm.
- Time and donenessA 4 lb whole fish takes roughly 45-60 minutes at 325F. Judge by the thickest part behind the head — 125-130F for trout and salmon that stays moist, 145F if you want the USDA figure. The flesh should just separate from the backbone.
- Scraping the backboneThe recipe says only to do this "if large." It is usually read as running a knife along either side of the spine inside the cavity so heat reaches the centre of a thick fish, though it may equally mean scraping away the dark blood line along the backbone. Slashing the skin two or three times on each flank opens a thick fish with less damage.
- The water in the pan"Just enough to keep it from scorching" is about a quarter inch, replenished if it dries. It steams the underside and, more importantly, gives you the pan liquor that goes into the sauce at the end.
- Why the cream is dilutedThe recipe gives its own reason: undiluted cream may clot as it heats. The few spoonfuls of hot water and the gentle double-boiler heat are the insurance against that. Keep the heat low and add the pan gravy off the boil rather than into a rolling one. "Boil up once" means bring it just to a bubble and stop.
- SeasoningThe recipe names no salt or pepper at all. Salt the fish inside and out before it goes in, and taste the finished sauce.
- The nasturtium garnishNasturtium flowers are edible and peppery, and were a standard kitchen-garden plant in 1900. Use unsprayed blooms if you use them at all; supermarket flowers are not grown for eating.
- YieldA 4 lb whole fish serves four to six as a main course, with the cup of cream sauce about right for that number.
Whole baked fish with a cream or butter sauce was a familiar "company" fish dish of the American middle-class table in the decades either side of 1900, and the phrasing here — the diluted cream, the double boiler, the wreath of blossoms round the platter — belongs to the household-manual tradition in which presentation was treated as part of the recipe rather than an afterthought. The name "salmon trout" was never precise: it was used for lake trout in the Great Lakes states, for sea-run trout in New England, and for steelhead on the Pacific coast, its common thread being size and pink flesh rather than any one species. That the book calls it "a fine game fish" is telling — in a period before widespread refrigerated shipping, a large trout on the table was often one someone had caught rather than bought.