Sprats

Sprats marinés teach the discipline of restraint in a cold marinade. The fish is already cured by smoke and salt, so your work is not to remake it but to wake it with shallot, parsley, oil, and vinegar. Choose plump sprats before you do anything else. A marinade can carry flavour over the flesh, but it cannot put richness back into a fish that began dry.

The book's kitchen kept Cooked Marinade for Venison (No. 168) in a larder quantity large enough for service. One cook does not need five quarts: reach for one spoonful of that finished, fully cooled preparation, then sharpen it with the small measures of fresh oil and vinegar the entry demands. Rebuilding the referenced marinade here is brigade scaffolding; heading the fish, dressing them lightly, and turning them through five or six hours are the dish, and those stay.

Arrange the sprats close enough to share the dressing but not piled so tightly that the bottom fish drown. Turn them gently and repeatedly. That is the one step that decides whether the shallot and vinegar reach every side. The finished fish should look supple and silver-bronze, with no puddle masquerading as a sauce. Cooking well is not cooking fancy.