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Browned Salmon Trout
Dredge the prepared fish lightly with flour, secure firmly in a cloth, put in a kettle, and cook in slightly salted water boiling. A medium-sized fish will boil in three-quarters of an hour or in one-half hour. The juice of half of a lemon in the water that fish is boiled in is an improvement. As soon as done take from the kettle, remove the cloth, drain well, lay in a folded napkin on a hot platter, garnish with lemon and parsley, and serve with fish sauce or drawn butter.
A plain poached fish dressed up for the table. The method is sound; the timing belongs to an era when fish was routinely cooked until it fell apart.
- The timing is the problemThree-quarters of an hour (the recipe also allows a half hour) will reduce a medium fish to dry flakes. Poach at a bare shiver rather than a boil and reckon roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point. Cooks who like salmon trout translucent pull it at 125-130F at the spine, 140F for firm; note that this is below the 145F usually given for fish.
- "Boiling" is not literal here"Boiling" -- The recipe does say boiling, but a rolling boil tears the skin and forces albumin out in white curds. Bring the water up, then hold it at 170-180F, where the surface only trembles.
- The clothWrapping the fish in muslin or cheesecloth, with the ends left long, is genuinely useful: it lets you lift a whole fish out intact. Plain unbleached cheesecloth or a clean linen tea towel works; leave the wrapping loose enough for water to circulate.
- KettleA fish kettle -- a long lidded pan with a perforated lift-out plate. A roasting pan on the stovetop, covered with foil, does the same job for a whole fish.
- The flour dredgeOn a boiled fish this does very little beyond helping the skin hold together. The recipe is titled "browned" yet contains no browning step. If you want colour, poach, chill, then finish the fish in butter.
- Salmon troutA period name for large lake or sea-run trout with pink flesh, sold today as steelhead, sea trout or simply large rainbow trout. Farmed steelhead is the closest match; salmon behaves the same way.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter in this usage but a thin white sauce -- butter and flour cooked together, thinned with the hot fish liquor or milk, seasoned and sharpened with lemon. Hollandaise or a caper butter serves the same purpose.
- ServingA 3 lb fish feeds four to six. The folded napkin on the platter absorbs the drips that would otherwise thin the sauce; a warmed platter matters more than the napkin does.
Boiling a whole fish in a cloth and sending it to table on a folded napkin with drawn butter was standard Anglo-American practice through the nineteenth century, and this entry preserves it almost unchanged. "Salmon trout" was a market name rather than a species, applied loosely to any large pink-fleshed trout -- Great Lakes fish were shipped inland by rail in ice, which is why a household manual could assume a whole one on the kitchen table. The instruction to lay it in a napkin is a holdover from formal service, where the linen caught the water that inevitably seeped from a boiled fish; the long cooking times are often said to reflect a period in which underdone fish was considered not merely unpleasant but unwholesome, a conviction that seems to have outlasted any evidence for it.