Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [204]
This is one reason why people pay apparently ridiculous sums for a stretch of trout fishing, and why people since the Middle Ages have been studying the trout’s habits with that passionate, contradictory love that hunters seem to devote to their prey.
In their book on trout, in Collins’s New Naturalist series, W. E. Frost and M. E. Brown point out that long before Izaak Walton was born, Dame Juliana Berners was discoursing on the joys of trout fishing and the correct comportment of trout fisherman (to be summed up as ‘Don’t be greedy’). The two modern authors delight in the variety of size and colouring in our native brown trout. In Lough Derg and Lake Windermere the trout are large and silvery with black spots. In the small brown tarns near Windermere, the little fish have ’yellow bellies and red spots on their dark sides’. Some trout have pink flesh like salmon – they are the best of all to eat – some have white flesh. ‘As trout swim and turn gracefully in their native waters – in rushing becks, placid lakes or yellow bog-pool – they are, simply, beautiful.’
That great American fisherman and expert, A. J. McClane takes a mildly reproachful view of trout. The shades of Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton do not daunt someone who has caught at least half a million – though he didn’t eat them all, I hasten to say. With such experience, he has found that the quality of wild trout can be most variable according to the waters they come from, with, as you would expect in this polluted world, the best ones being found in high clear mountain streams.
One of the things that intrigued me most in his descriptions of trout was the history he gives of trout farming. As long ago as the fourteenth century, a French monk, Dom Pichon, discovered that trout eggs could be artificially impregnated. It took another five centuries before the idea was developed and the French government had a hatchery built in 1852. The first American farm was begun in 1864 by Seth Green, at Mumford, New York, and as one clerical angler made clear, some years later, doom was nigh: ‘Trout will be hatched by machinery and raised in ponds, and fattened on chopped liver, and grow flabby and lose their spots. The trout of the restaurant will not cease to be but he is no more like a trout of the wild river than the fat and songless reed-bird is like the bobolink. Gross feeding and easy pond life enervate and deprave him.’
Precisely. I shall silently honour the Reverend Myron Reed on the rare occasions when I cannot avoid eating farm trout. Of course, just as trout from different waters vary, so do trout from different farms and farm trout handled in different ways. Mr McClane’s great experience bears out my own empiric conclusions that a flash-frozen Danish trout, packaged and bought from the supermarket, can taste much better than the more romantically acquired trout from a local farm where the fish may be overcrowded and overfed with what looks like pellets of cat food. And when these local trout have been lying around on ice at the fishmonger’s, they can be poor eating indeed, with a strange muddy taste that reminds me of London tapwater.
Chars are rare now in our country. They include the Arctic char, once so prolific in Windermere that locally potted char became a famous delicacy that was sent down to London. Occasionally one finds the shallow dishes they were packed in: white pottery with gaily coloured fish swimming round the outside, and a high price ticket underneath. Celia Fiennes in her way round England in the late seventeenth century commented on the Lake District char, ‘part of the whole skin and the fin and tail is red like the fins of a perch, and the inside flesh looks as red as any salmon… their taste is very rich and fat tho’ not so strong or clogging as the lampreys are, but it’s as fat and rich a food.’ Char are still caught,