SC - once again bread & FISH

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Stacie wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have a tasty recipe for  Lake Erie Walleye.....I have some that
> is begging to be taken out of the freezer......I usually just bake it in the
> oven with a little lemon and butter (sprinkled lightly with salt and pepper)
> but i would like to try something new....

A walleye being basically a perch on steroids, there are some period
recipes for perch that should do really well. One that comes to mind is
egredouce (fried fish in sweet-and-sour sauce) which is ideally suited
since walleye, as I recall, needs to be skinned before eating, so
skinless, boneless fillet chunks are a perfect presentation for both the
fish and the dish. (Yeah, the recipe doesn't specify the fish is boned,
but it does make it easier to deal with the sauce, etc.)

>From the "Forme of Cury" (which specifies rabbit or kid as the meat, but
fish was commonly eaten in this sauce:

Egurdouce
Take conynges or kydde and smyte hem on pecys rawe, and fry hem in white
grece. Take raysons of Corance and fry hem; take oynons, parboile hem
and hew hem small and fry hem. Take rede wine, sugar, with powdor of
peper, of gynger, of canel; salt; and cast therto; and lat it seeth with
a gode quantite of white grece; ans serue it forth.

Quantities _loosely_ adapted from Hieatt & Butler's "Pleyn Delit":

2 lbs Lake Erie Walleye ;  )
Flour for coating fish
lard for frying plus 1 - 2 Tbs for the sauce, or use vegetable shortening
1/2 cup currants
3 onions, parboiled (optional) and minced
1 1/2 cups red wine
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon each ginger and cinnamon
1/4 tsp pepper (I like more)
1 tsp salt or to taste

H&B call for a thickener of bread crumbs, but I feel it's gratuitous.
The white grease added at the end of the cooking process provides some
slight thickening power; you have to have the sauce at a hard boil when
you add the lard in tiny bits for it to work. It becomes temporarily
emulsified into the rest of the syrupy sauce, cutting some of its
sharpness and making it just slightly thicker, but lighter in texture.
Another possibility, and far more faithful than breadcrumbs, would be to
take perhaps half the solids from the sauce, run them through a food
mill, and return them to the sauce. The flour for frying really isn't
much of a departure: Taillevent speaks of frying fish _without_ flour,
suggesting it was done at least sometimes in 14th century France. The
recipe speaks of parboiling the onions before mincing and frying them;
it seems to make little or no difference in the finished product, and if
you don't buy the medical theory that probably motivates the
instruction, you might well omit the extra step.

Anyway, I suggest coating the fish with seasoned flour (use a plastic
bag), frying it in lard or shortening, removing the fish to keep warm
for a few, and make the sauce by removing most of the fat from the pan,
sauteeing the onions and the currants, adding the remaining sauce
ingredients except for the lard, bringing it to a boil, adding the lard
if you want to use it for thickening, otherwise mill, sieve, or puree
part of the currants and onions strained from the sauce, adding them
back, and pouring the sauce over the fish.

The original recipe says you should fry the currants first, then the
onions. This suggests to me the onions should not become browned in the
frying, and may also be part of why the onions are parboiled first, to
be sure they're soft enough.  

Hope this helps!

Adamantius
Østgardr, East
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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