Trout with Montpellier Butter

Ingredients

• trout
• Montpellier butter

Method

1. 1

   Prepare the trout and serve it with Montpellier butter as a cold entrée for supper.

As published

This recipe was extracted from The spirit of cookery (1895) by Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Thudichum, page 346. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

trout, and is most esteemed ; the colour of its flesh is supposed to be derived from the spawn and young of the crayfish which the trout eat. Although trout may grow to very large size (Soyer ate of one, taken in the Lake of Killarney, which weighed 26 lb.), they occur in the market only of moderate size. Trout should be boiled in salt water, with a little vinegar and aromatic herbs, and served with boiled potatoes and browned butter. This is the form to which, after having tried many others, we always prefer to return. Gold boiled troxd is excellent when served in a mayonnaise. When travelling in the Pyrenees we had this dish put before us almost daily. There is a recipe for Trout boiled in Wine, an echo of the faisan Lxicxdhis of Vuillemot, which we advise our readers not to spoil their fish with ; even the ragout of mushrooms, the allemande sauce, and the garnishes could not restore the flavour of the trout drowned in and evaporated with the champagne or sauterne. Trout may be prepared axi gmtin, or boiled, sauced, egged, and baked, (d VAxurore), or baked in envelopes with fine herbs, or stujfed and stexoed (trnites farcies), or filleted and fried. 550 THE SJTE/T OF COOKERy We have just related that the ‘ stuffed trout ’ was to have been boiled in wine. This recipe comes from Eeyni^re, of ‘ Ahnanach ’ notoriety ; he directed that the wine in which the trout was boiling should he. made to take fire, probably as a proof of the alcohol having in the main been expelled. Many cookery-book compilers in succession copy this one from the other without seeing its purport, saying that, if the wine took fire, it would improve the sauce. None of these writers has ever made this sauce, simply because a composition such as the recipe of Eeyniere indicates does not, because it cannot, take fire, even if it flashed when a lighted match were put to it. Eeyniere recommended the addition of a little wine to the mixture of bouillon and vege- tables ; the next generation of cookery-book compilers pre- scribed a bottlefid of chablis ; the latest lights with the coeur leger, two or three bottles full. Such a sautapan they no doubt could have fired, and the kitchen chimney, perhaps the kitchen as well. These recipes are striking instances of the errors of some of these writers — namely, of attempting to give themselves an air of magnificence by written pro- positions, which, when closely considered, are entirely im- practicable. Trout may be filleted, fried, and be formed into an ‘ epigram,’ a mysterious name from early French cookery, in which there was an element of symbolic mysticism. A good cold entrde for supper is Trout loith Montpellier Blotter

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.