SC - Re- "Novice Only Redac

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Mark Harris wrote:
> 
> On Wed., July 30, ciorstan said:
> 
> Place perch in water, cooking the flesh until almost done, but not quite.
> Remove and gut it. (Why would the cook 'draw' the fish at this point? why not
> before cooking?
> 
> >>>>>
> I think this is a good question. I would interpret "draw" as cut rather
> than gut and clean but I have nothing concrete to base that on. Anyone
> have a definative answer here?

Nope. Nuthin' definitve here. But I've cooked fish from a lot of later
recipes that APPEAR to use the same terminology, only, being later
recipes, also tend to have more detail. Based on all this (and this is
probably the most detailed documentation you're going to get from me for
a while) I'm inclined to think that the fish is first drawn
(eviscerated) through some opening probably along the jawline behind the
armored gill structures, poached (the distinction between poaching,
simmering, and boiling having been much more blurry in the days before
thermometers, and, medieval cooks not being a stupid lot, they surely
discovered that a barely imperceptible simmer worked best) removed from
the cooking liquid, and "pulled". This is the subject of some debate.
Since the fish is not mentioned as being scaled (some fish don't need
this but perch do) I can only assume that the fish is served without the
scales and skin. My best guess is that the instruction to "pull" the
fish is either one of those odd carvers terms ("barb that crab, splay
that haddock", etc.) or that pulling is a basic dismemberment by hand,
like, say, pulling apart a roast chicken. Illustrations and the various
bookes of nurture would seem to suggest that the fish was probably
served with the head on the plate: I'm inclined to think that the thing
to do is to skin and bone the body section, and reassemble the four
naturally occurring fillets back onto the plate with the head, and
garnish with your flat parsley leaves.

There's so much uncertainty at work here that while we can get a general
and recognizable approximation of the original dish, it's open to a lot
of varying interpretations.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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