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Boiled Fish with Hollandaise Sauce
A pike is good for boiling. Wrap the fish in a cloth; place over the fire and boil slowly until done. The length of time for cooking will depend much upon the size of fish. For Sauce-Beat half a teacup of butter to a cream, add the yolks of two eggs, juice of half a lemon, salt, and a very little cayenne pepper, put in a saucepan of boiling water, beat with an egg-beater, until it begins to thicken; then add a half cup of boiling water, beating continually. When to the consistency of stiff custard, it is done. It will not take more than five to seven minutes to cook, if the water boils hard.
Two techniques in one entry: a whole fish poached in a cloth, and a hand-beaten hollandaise. The book assumes you know both, so the details worth pinning down are the ones it leaves out.
- Do not actually boilA hard boil breaks the flesh apart and drives it against the cloth. Keep the water at a bare shiver, with only occasional bubbles, which is the likely sense of the recipe's "boil slowly."
- The clothWrapping a whole fish in cheesecloth or a clean linen towel, with the ends left long, is how you lift it out in one piece. Fish kettles with perforated racks existed alongside the practice. Tie it loosely; a tight wrap presses the skin into the flesh.
- Timing and donenessFigure roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, which for a 3-4 lb pike usually lands at 20-30 minutes. Cooked through means 145F at the backbone, or the flesh parting cleanly from the bone.
- Poaching liquidPlain water gives a plain fish. Salt the water generously and add a bay leaf, sliced onion, a few peppercorns and a splash of vinegar or white wine — a court bouillon, which fuller period books do describe.
- Pike bonesNorthern pike carries Y-shaped intramuscular bones along the loin in addition to the ribs. Cooking it whole helps here, since the flesh lifts off the bone structure in sheets once cooked.
- "A saucepan of boiling water"A makeshift double boiler: the butter-and-yolk vessel goes in or over a pan of boiling water, not over direct heat. Direct heat under two yolks and this much butter will scramble them in seconds.
- If it breaksPull it off the heat the moment it looks grainy and beat in a tablespoon of cold water, or start a fresh yolk in a warm bowl and dribble the broken sauce into it. The final half cup of boiling water in the original is doing double duty: it thins the sauce and stabilises it.
- YieldThe sauce as written makes about a cup, enough for a fish serving six to eight. Hollandaise does not keep or reheat; make it while the fish rests in its cloth.
Hollandaise appears in American household books as "Dutch sauce," a name often said to derive from the Netherlands' reputation for butter rather than from any Dutch dish, and it arrived attached most often to poached fish and asparagus. This version is a household one rather than a professional one: no clarified butter, no reduction of vinegar and shallot, just creamed butter, yolks, lemon and cayenne beaten over hot water with the wire egg-beater that had by then become cheap and common. That pike heads the entry says something about the American table this book was written for — in the Great Lakes and the upper Midwest, pike and its relatives were the abundant, inexpensive fish, and a whole one poached and sauced was the freshwater answer to a boiled salmon on an Eastern sideboard.