Tea at Trianon: A Century-Old Trout Hatchery in Virginia Is Making Waves

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, March 25, 2023

A Century-Old Trout Hatchery in Virginia Is Making Waves

From Garden and Gun:

Ty Walker is up to his ears in trout. From his home in New Castle, Virginia, Walker raises thousands of rainbow trout on a nearly hundred-year-old hatchery situated on a mountain spring. The hatchery, built in the 1930s by the federal government, still operates the way it always has, relying on gravity and an abundant supply of limestone-filtered water to fill the raceways and ponds where the fish grow to maturity. In 2022, Walker estimates that he and his brother-in-law, Matthew, processed around eight thousand trout by hand, cleaning, gutting, and packing the fish before they could be sold. This year, the trout count is up to twenty thousand, and Walker is committed to putting them front and center (and whole) on plates around the state of Virginia. His hatchery, called Smoke in Chimneys, sells to chefs, as well as by mail-order online. “Our goal is to make eating a whole trout right up there with shucking oysters or picking crabs,” Walker explains. “Eating whole trout should be in that sphere, but the barrier to entry is like walking into a cigar shop and not knowing anything about cigars. You already feel like an idiot.” Walker wants to change that, and he hopes that people will be willing to learn about the beauties of eating the state fish, grown in its home state, with a little help from some of Virginia’s best chefs. (Read more.)