To stew CARP or TENCH.

At the Top stew'd Carp or Tench.

At the Top stew'd Tench and Cod's Head.

MATELOT OF TENCH.

Mode.Scale and clean the tench, cut them into pieces, and lay them in a stewpan; add the stock, wine, onions, mushrooms, herbs, and mace, and simmer gently for 1/2 hour.

Put into another stewpan all the remaining ingredients but the oysters and lemon-juice, and boil slowly for 10 minutes, when add the strained liquor from the tench, and keep stirring it over the fire until somewhat reduced.

Rub it through a sieve, pour it over the tench with the oysters, which must be previously scalded in their own liquor, squeeze in the lemon-juice, and serve.

Clean and crimp the tench; carefully lay it in a stewpan with the stock, wine, salt and pepper, and bay-leaf; let it stew gently for 1/2 hour; then take it out, put it on a dish, and keep hot.

A SINGULAR QUALITY IN THE TENCH.It is said that the tench is possessed of such healing properties among the finny tribes, that even the voracious pike spares it on this account.

The pike, fell tyrant of the liquid plain, With ravenous waste devours his fellow train; Yet howsoe'er with raging famine pined, The tench he spares, a medicinal kind; For when by wounds distress'd, or sore disease, He courts the salutary fish for ease; Close to his scales the kind physician glides, And sweats a healing balsam from his sides.

In our estimation, however, this self-denial in the pike may be attributed to a less poetical cause; namely, from the mud-loving disposition of the tench, it is enabled to keep itself so completely concealed at the bottom of its aqueous haunts, that it remains secure from the attacks of its predatory neighbour.

FISH PIE, WITH TENCH AND EELS. 349.

Clean and bone the tench, skin and bone the eels, and cut them into pieces 2 inches long, and leave the sides of the tench whole.

Lay the tench and eels in a pie-dish, and between each layer put seasoning, chopped parsley, and hard-boiled eggs; pour in part of the strained liquor, cover in with puff paste, and bake for 1/2 hour or rather more.

Each person's palate may be differently affectedpleased or displeased; and there is no standard by which to judge why a red mullet, a sole, or a turbot, should be better or worse than a salmon, trout, pike, or a tiny tench.

Savanarola adds, cold, moist: and phlegmatic, Isaac; and therefore unwholesome for all cold and melancholy complexions: others make a difference, rejecting only amongst freshwater fish, eel, tench, lamprey, crawfish (which Bright approves, cap.

Paulus Jovius on the other side, disallowing tench, approves of it; so doth Dubravius in his Books of Fishponds.

Tench, Captain.

The boys delighted in the large ponds, full of old carp and tench, with dace and roach, perch, gudgeons, eels, tadpoles, sticklebacks, and curious creatures of the weedy bottom.

And she, at first astonished, was soon all deft housewifeliness, breathless officiousness, and behind my back, of her own intuitiveness, grated some dry almonds found there, and with them sprinkled the fried tench.

He could see now that he had felt it years before, when he first met the wife of Elder Tench, the gaunt, gray woman, toiling along the dusty road; and again when he had found the imbecile boy turning upon his tormentors.

On the trial of Hugh Peters in 1660, it was sworn that this was done by his orders given on the scaffold to one Tench, a joiner; in Houndsditch.

Summing up the observations of Cook, Turnbull, Cunningham, Tench, Hunter, and others, Waitz remarks (VI., 737):

But it is commodious, and possesses a side-chamber which will serve us admirably for a green-room when the proprietoran affable person by the name of Tench has removed the onions at present drying on the floor; which he has engaged to do.

And, by one of those coincidences we meet, perhaps, oftener than we note, Mr. Tench's initial is 'S'standing for Samuel.