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To Fry Pike and Pickerel
These fish should be fried in the same manner as mackerel. They are very nice served with oyster sauce or drawn butter. Garnish with sliced lemon and curled parsley.
A cross-reference recipe: the book expects you to have read its mackerel entry, which means split or filleted fish, seasoned, dredged, and fried in hot fat in a heavy skillet. The useful work here is decoding the two sauces and dealing with the fish itself.
- "In the same manner as mackerel"The method itself is not given on this page. Period fish frying generally means: pat dry, season, dredge in flour or fine cornmeal, and fry in a heavy pan in a shallow depth of hot fat, a few minutes a side for fillets; 350-375F is a modern equivalent rather than anything the book specifies. Turning once rather than repeatedly helps keep the crust on soft-fleshed freshwater fish.
- Drawn butterNot simply melted butter. Nineteenth-century drawn butter is a small white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour, thinned with a cup of hot water or fish broth, seasoned, with more butter beaten in off the heat. It is the default fish sauce of the era.
- Oyster sauceHere it means drawn butter with poached oysters and a little of their liquor stirred in, not the bottled Cantonese condiment. Add the oysters at the end and let them heat through for a minute or two; simmered longer they turn rubbery.
- Pike bonesNorthern pike carry a row of forked intermuscular ("Y") bones above the ribs that filleting does not remove by accident. Cut them out in a strip before frying; they are too substantial to soften in the pan.
- PickerelIn American usage of the period this could mean chain pickerel or, in the Great Lakes and Canada, walleye, which is still sold as pickerel there. Both fry well; walleye is the thicker fillet and wants the lower end of the heat range.
- DonenessCook to 145F at the thickest point, or until the flesh is opaque and parts cleanly. Freshwater fish of this type dries out quickly past that.
- Curled parsleyCurly parsley was commonly crisped in ice water so it would stand up on the platter; flat-leaf parsley will not curl.
- YieldFigure 6-8 oz of fillet per person. A whole pike of 2-3 lb yields roughly a pound to a pound and a half of fillet, serving two or three with sauce.
Pike and pickerel were everyday food across the northern United States and Canada, and the book gives them a bare paragraph and points the reader to mackerel instead of repeating the method. Both fish had a mixed reputation: cheap, abundant, bony, and inclined to taste of the weedy water they came from, which may account for the two rich sauces and the lemon. Drawn butter and oyster sauce were the standard genteel dressings for any plain fish in American cookery of the period, and canned or barreled oysters are generally said to have been inexpensive enough in these years that oyster sauce was closer to routine than to luxury. The instruction to garnish with sliced lemon and curled parsley reflects the era's conviction that a platter of fried fish was not finished until it had been made to look composed.