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Forcemeat for Baked Pike
Prepare three ounces of bread-crumbs from a stale loaf, shred two ounces of suet, and mince eight or ten bearded oysters. Put these together into a stewpan, with a flavouring of mace (pounded), salt, and pepper. Moisten with the liquor from the oysters, and six table-spoonfuls of thick cream. Bind with the yolks of two eggs, and stir over the fire till the mixture thickens. Stuff this forcemeat into the pike, and sew the fish up securely. Time to thicken forcemeat, four or five minutes; to bake pike, one hour, more or less. Sufficient for one pike.
A rich Victorian stuffing for a whole freshwater pike: breadcrumbs, suet and oysters bound with egg and cream. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- Bearded oysters"Bearded" means the frilly gill and the tough muscle have been trimmed away, leaving the plump body. Shucked oysters sold in tubs are usually already clean; if you shuck your own, cut off the dark frill with scissors and keep the liquor, which is called for a line later.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded fine. Packet shredded suet works directly; block suet should be frozen briefly and grated. Vegetarian suet behaves the same in a stuffing but tastes flatter. Butter is a workable substitute at the same weight, though the mixture will be softer.
- The hinge: stop as soon as it thickensTwo egg yolks in cream and oyster liquor will scramble if the pan gets past a bare simmer. Keep the heat low, stir constantly, and pull it off at four or five minutes when it coats the spoon. A curdled forcemeat cannot be brought back.
- Quantities in modern termsThree ounces of breadcrumbs is about 85 g, roughly a cup and a half loosely packed; two ounces of suet is about 55 g. Six tablespoons of thick cream is 90 ml of double or heavy cream. Stale loaf matters: fresh crumb goes pasty.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; Victorian coal ranges generally had no thermometer, and the recipe names no oven term to translate. As a modern working figure, a baked whole pike suits a moderate oven, around 350-375F (180-190C). The hour is for a large fish; a 3-4 lb pike will likely be done well inside that.
- Sewing and coolingLet the forcemeat cool before it goes into the fish, or the residual heat starts cooking the flesh from inside. Use a trussing needle and cotton string, and stuff loosely — breadcrumbs swell.
- DonenessStuffed fish cooks slower than plain. Check that the thickest part of the flesh flakes and that the centre of the stuffing has reached 165F (74C); it contains egg, cream and shellfish.
- If you cannot get pikePike is rarely sold commercially in Britain or the United States. Any firm whole white fish of similar size — a large sea bass, a small cod, a whole trout — takes the same stuffing. Pike itself is notoriously full of fine Y-bones, which is part of why it fell out of the shops.
- Yield"Sufficient for one pike" is the only guide given. The quantity stuffs a fish of about 3–4 lb, serving four.
Forcemeat comes through the French farce, from farcir, to stuff, and by the nineteenth century it named any bound, seasoned mixture used to fill meat, fish or poultry — Cassell's devotes a whole run of entries to variants for different birds and joints. Pike was a prestigious freshwater fish in English cookery for centuries; Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) gives a celebrated recipe for a stuffed and roasted pike and calls it \"too good for any but anglers, or very honest men.\" The oyster here is not the luxury it later became: through most of the Victorian period oysters were cheap, abundant and used freely as a seasoning ingredient in stuffings, sauces and pies, and only became expensive after the beds collapsed toward the end of the century. The pairing of a lean freshwater fish with suet, cream and shellfish liquor is characteristic of the period's approach — pike is dry and bony, and the forcemeat exists to supply the fat and savour the fish itself lacks.