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Trout
(Provincial France.) Clean, wash, and dry 6 fine trout, add salt, pepper, a carrot, a bayleaf, and some thyme, and 1 pint of water mixed with 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Cook for 15 minutes, drain the fish and cover them with a sauce made of 1/2 pint stewed tomatoes, 2 truffles, 6 mushrooms, and an onion, cut up, 12 olives and some parsley. This must boil 15 minutes before straining it over the fish and using the olives as a garnish along the edge. Serve at once, very hot. SMELTS (as cooked in Dresden.).
Clean and dry 18 large smelts, take out the bones and stuff them with a forcemeat of bread-crumbs, butter, chopped oysters, and mushrooms, seasoned to taste. Put in a dish, cover with some chopped onion, the juice of a lemon, 1/2 pint of milk or white stock, and 1 ounce of butter. Bake for 1/2 hour. Serve with a border of parsley and more sauce made of flour, butter, milk, or stock, in a bowl, separately.
Two dishes run together on one page: trout poached in a quick court-bouillon under a tomato-olive sauce, and boned smelts baked in milk. Both are written for a cook who already knows how fish behaves, so the timings need reading with judgement.
- Pint sizeA pint here may be either 16 or 20 fl oz. For the poaching liquid it makes no practical difference; for the half pint of milk on the smelts, err toward the smaller measure and add more if the dish looks dry.
- The poaching liquid is a court-bouillonWater, vinegar, carrot, bay and thyme is the standard French short broth for fish. Bring it to a bare shiver before the trout go in and keep it there. A rolling boil splits the skin and squeezes the flesh.
- Fifteen minutes is for large fishWhole trout of 10-12 oz are done in 8-10 minutes in barely trembling liquid; the flesh should just part at the backbone. Farmed portion trout of 6-8 oz need less still. Fifteen minutes suits larger fish; the recipe gives no weight.
- Straining the sauce"straining it over the fish" may mean no more than pouring it over with the solids rather than passing it through a sieve, since the olives are then lifted out for garnish. If you want a smooth sauce, sieve it and scatter the mushrooms and olives back on.
- TrufflesTwo truffles were a far smaller luxury in a provincial kitchen of the period than they are now. A teaspoon of truffle paste, or simply another handful of brown mushrooms cooked hard until they colour, keeps the dish honest.
- Smelts and their bonesSmelts are small enough that the whole spine lifts out in one piece: open along the belly, snip the backbone at head and tail, and pull. Eighteen fish, three apiece, makes a course for six.
- Bake at 350FThe original gives no temperature. Half an hour at 350F suits a dish of stuffed smelts sitting in milk; check at 20 minutes, as the fish themselves are cooked long before the liquid has reduced.
- The forcemeatChopped oysters release liquid as they heat, so keep the breadcrumbs dry and coarse or the stuffing turns to paste. It is cooked through in the oven, which is why raw oysters in it are not a concern.
- The separate sauceFlour, butter and milk or stock is a plain white sauce; a scant ounce of each of flour and butter to a half pint of liquid gives the right coating body. Enrich it with the strained pan juices from the smelts rather than making it apart.
Both recipes belong to the small genre of turn-of-the-century travel cookbooks, in which an English-speaking writer collected dishes noted abroad and reproduced them for a home kitchen, keeping the place-name as a kind of credential: "Provincial France," "as cooked in Dresden." The trout is a recognisable provincial formula, fish poached in a vinegar court-bouillon and dressed with a tomato and olive sauce of the sort found across the French south, where olives and tomatoes were kitchen staples rather than imports. The smelts are more surprising: a landlocked German city eating small fish stuffed with oysters shows how far rail freight and the ice trade had pushed shellfish inland, the oysters being the travelling ingredient. Smelt itself was then an abundant and cheap fish on both sides of the Atlantic, fried by the dozen in season, and the boning and stuffing here is the kind of fussy treatment a common fish gets when a cook wants to make a course of it.