Take a carp, scale, and scrape off the slime with your knife, wipe it with a dry cloth, bone it, and mince it with a fresh water eel being flayed and boned; season it with beaten cloves, mace, salt, pepper, and some sweet herbs, as tyme, parsley, and some sweet marjoram minced very small, stew it in a broad mouthed pipkin, with some claret wine, gooseberries, or grapes, and some blanched chesnuts; being finely stewed, serve it on carved sippets about it, and run it over with beaten butter, garnish the dish with fine grated manchet searsed, and some fryed oysters in butter, cockles, or prawns.
Sometimes for variety, use pistaches, pine-apple-seeds, or some blanch’t almonds stew’d amongst the hash, or asparagus, or artichock boil’d & cut as big as chesnuts, & garnish the dish with scraped horse-radish, and rub the
bottom of the dish in which you serve the meat, with a clove or two of garlick. Sometimes mingle it with some stewed oysters, or put to it some oyster-liquor.
[ To marinate a Carp to be eaten hot or cold.]
Take a carp, scale it, and scrape off the slime, wipe it clean with a dry cloth, and split it down the back, flour it, and fry it in sweet sallet oyl, or good clarified butter; being fine and crisp fryed, lay it in a deep dish or earthen pan, then have some white or claret wine, or wine-vinegar, put it in a broad mouthed pipkin with all manner of sweet herbs bound up in a bundle, as rosemary, tyme, sweet marjoram, parsley, winter-savory, bay-leaves, sorrel, and sage, as much of one as the other, put it into the pipkin with the wine, with some large mace, slic’t ginger, gross pepper, slic’t nutmeg, whole cloves, and salt, with as much wine and vinegar as will cover the dish, then boil the spices and wine with some salt a little while, pour it on the fish hot, and presently cover it close to keep in the spirits of the liquor, herbs, and spices for an hours space; then have slic’t lemons, lemon-peels, orange and orange peels, lay them over the fish in the pan, and cover it up close; when you serve them hot lay on the spices and herbs all about it, with the slic’t lemons, oranges, and their peels, and run it over with sweet sallet oyl, (or none) but some of the liquor it is soust in.
Or marinate the carp or carps without sweet herbs for hot or cold, only bay-leaves, in all points else as is abovesaid; thus you may marinate soles, or any other fish, whether sea or fresh-water fish.
Or barrel it, pack it close, and it will keep as long as sturgeon, and as good.
[ To broil or toast a Carp divers ways, either in sweet Butter or Sallet Oyl.]
Take a carp alive, draw it, and wash out the blood in the body with claret wine into a dish, put to it some wine vinegar and oyl, then scrape off the slime, & wipe it dry both outside & inside, lay it in the dish with vinegar, wine, oyl, salt, and the streight sprigs of rosemary and parsley, let it steep there the space of an hour or two, then broil it on a clean scowred gridiron, (or toast it before the fire) broil it on a soft fire, and turn it often; being finely broil’d, serve it on a clean scowred dish, with the oyl, wine, and vinegar, being stew’d on the coals, put it to the fish, the rosemary and parsley round the dish, and some about the fish, or with beaten butter and vinegar, or butter and verjuyce, or juyce of oranges beaten with the butter, or juyce of lemons, garnish the fish with slices of orange, lemon, and branches of rosemary; boil the milt or spawn by it self and lay it in the dish with the Carp.
Or make sauce otherways with beaten butter, oyster liquor, the blood of the carp, grated nutmeg, juyce of orange, white-wine, or wine vinegar boil’d together, crumbs of bread, and the yolk of an egg boiled up pretty thick, and run it over the fish.