Clean them well, but don’t cut off the heads. Leave the eyes in though your guests may revolt. Dry them thoroughly, salt and pepper to taste and finish by rolling them in either flour or cornmeal.
Butter the pan and get it just hot enough so that the butter begins to brown, and then drop your fish in one at a time.
Don’t for heaven’s sake dump them all in together or the butter will get cold, and don’t have too much grease, and don’t treat brook trout as though they were ordinary fish. Trout are different and the cooking of them is an art practiced successfully only by those who understand them and who have served a long apprenticeship exploring their haunts.
When you get done, if you have lived right and know the signs, you will have something that you will remember for a thousand meals afterward, a crisp, brown, tender delicacy with a flavor compounded of spring-fed pools, moss-covered rocks, water cress with marsh marigold on the side, deep shadows under the alders and even the sound of whitethroats beside some rapids or the sooming of nighthawks at dusk.
Most people realize at once that no fish can ever measure up to such an outstanding combination of qualities unless the fisherman and cook has through the years endowed some particular species with a proper emotional background. That accomplished—and most trout fishermen have reached that point or they long ago would have abandoned their sport for something much less arduous—then the actual cooking and its technique becomes instinctive procedure.
And when it comes to the serving of trout, the real artist knows that, if possible, it should be the pièce de résistance, should not be served with many other things, should be eaten alone as it deserves with a bit of bread, a pickle and a cup of coffee, that it is not a food to neutralize with a lot of foreign vegetables and gravy and other uncomplementary side dishes, that it tastes best alone where its delicate flavors have no competition.
And the heads—my grandmother, who was a past master at the cooking of trout, told me that they were by far the best part of the fish, that only insane people ever threw them away, that the cheeks and the choice bits of flesh back of the skull were tastier than all the rest, that severing the head meant an irreplaceable loss of juices and certain intangible qualities that only a connoisseur could recognize and appreciate.
Cook a brook trout right and you have a dish worth all the effort, but cook it carelessly without the thought of the aesthetic values and you have a dish that makes you wonder why anyone should go through the hardship necessary to bring in a mess when carp and other rough fish are on the market.