54 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



CHAPTER III. 



How to fish for, and to dress the Chavender, or Chub. 



PiscATOR. The chub, though he eat well thus dressed, yet as 

 he is usually dressed, he does not : he is objected against, not 

 only for being full of small forked bones, dispersed through all 

 his'body, but that he eats waterish, and that the flesh of him is 

 not firm, but short and tasteless. The French esteem him so 

 mean, as to call him Un Vilain ; nevertheless he may be so 

 dressed as to make him very good meat ; as namely, if he be a 

 large chub, then dress him thus : 



First scale him, and then wash him clean, and then take out 

 his guts ; and to that end make the hole as little and near to his 

 gills as you may conveniently, and especially make clean his 

 throat from the grass and weeds that are usually in it, for if that 

 be not very clean, it will make him to taste very sour : having 

 so done, put some sweet herbs into his belly, and then tie him 

 with two or three splinters to a spit, and roast him, basted often 

 with vinegar, or rather verjuice and butter, with good store of salt 



mixed with it. 



Bcinf' thus dressed, you will find him a much bettor dish of 

 meat than you, or most folk, even than anglers themselves, do 

 imafrine : for this dries up the fluid waterv humor with which all 

 chubs do abound. 



But take this rule with you, that a chub newly taken and 

 newly dressed, is so much better than a chub of a day's keeping 

 after he is dead, that I can compare him to nothing so fitly as to 

 cherries newly gathered from a tree, and others that have been 

 bruised and lain a day or two in water. But the chub being 

 thus used and dressed presently, and not washed after he is gut- 

 ted ; — for note, tliat lying long in water, and washing the blood 

 out of any fish after they be gutted, abates much of their sweet- 

 ness, — you will find the chub being dressed in the blood and 



