Season a pike; put in a baking-pan. Pour over two ounces of melted butter and 1 pint of sour cream; then let bake in a hot oven for twenty minutes. Sprinkle with bread-crumbs and grated cheese and let brown on top. Serve hot. Garnish with parsley.
November 30 — No. 30
Spanish
A very short entry that assumes a cook already knows how to handle a whole fish. The two things it leaves out are the size of the pike and how to keep the cream from breaking.
- Hot ovenIn a book of this vintage a hot oven means roughly 400-450F. At the upper end of that range a full pint of sour cream is likely to separate into curds and butterfat; 375-400F holds it together better and still browns the top.
- Twenty minutes is for filletsA whole pike of two to three pounds needs 30-40 minutes at this heat. Twenty minutes suits fillets or a small fish. Cook to 145F at the thickest part, where the flesh turns opaque and flakes from the bone.
- PikeWhole pike is a specialist purchase in most places now. Any firm, lean freshwater or white fish works in its place: walleye, perch, cod, haddock or hake. Pike is notoriously bony, which may be part of why it is less often sold today.
- Sour creamA pint is a full 16 oz, which is generous for a single fish and will pool in the pan. Use full-fat cultured sour cream or crème fraîche; low-fat versions and thinned commercial sour cream split almost immediately in the oven.
- "Season"The original leaves this entirely open. Salt and pepper are the minimum; paprika, lemon and a little garlic suit the cream, and paprika would at least gesture at the Spanish label.
- The crumb and cheese toppingAdd it in the last five to eight minutes, not at the start, or it darkens before the fish is done. A hard grating cheese such as Manchego or Parmesan browns without going oily.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, melted. With a pint of sour cream already in the pan it is largely there to grease the dish and enrich the sauce.
- YieldA two to three pound fish prepared this way serves four. Spoon the pan cream over each portion; it is the whole point of the dish.
The label "Spanish" here is doing very little work. Baked pike under sour cream is a Central and Eastern European treatment above all — it appears in Polish, Hungarian and Russian cookery, where pike was a staple freshwater fish and soured cream the default enriching sauce — and it has little to do with the Spanish kitchen, where olive oil rather than dairy carries baked fish. What the entry does record faithfully is the standing of pike itself: a common, cheap, bony market fish in Europe and the northern United States at the time, now largely displaced by ocean whitefish and rarely seen on a fishmonger's slab.