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Gravy for Pike, Baked
Mix a table-spoonful of flour very smoothly with half a pint of stock. Simmer gently, with a minced onion and a sprig of parsley, for twenty minutes, then strain and skim carefully, add pepper and salt to taste, and a dessert-spoonful of ketchup. Drain off the fat from the pan in which the pike has been baked, pour in the boiling liquid, stir it well, let it boil up once more, and serve. If no stock is at hand, a little may be made from gravy beef, any bones and trimmings of meat, or Bovril. Probable cost, about 2d. Sufficient for half a pint of gravy.
A pan sauce built on the roasting dish from a baked pike, thickened lightly with flour and sharpened with ketchup. The technique is deglazing, and the whole point is the browned residue left in the pan.
- Half a pintCassell's is working in imperial measure, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. The recipe states that it makes half a pint of gravy.
- A dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon: reckon it as 2 teaspoons, about 10 ml.
- Ketchup means mushroom ketchupIn a British book of this period, unqualified "ketchup" is mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin dark savoury condiment closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything tomato. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a splash of Worcestershire or a little soy is the nearest common substitute. Tomato ketchup will make this sweet and pink.
- Gravy beef and BovrilGravy beef is shin or leg, cut for long simmering. Bovril is the beef extract paste, still on shelves; a stock cube or a spoonful of commercial beef base does the same job. Half a pint of ready-made beef stock is a fair swap for the whole exercise.
- Mix the flour cold"Very smoothly with half a pint of stock" means whisk the flour into cold or barely warm stock before it goes near heat. A tablespoon of flour to 10 fl oz gives a thin, barely coating gravy — this is not intended to be thick.
- Strain and skimThe onion and parsley are flavouring only and are discarded. Skimming matters here because you then add the pan liquid; if you leave fat in both, the finished gravy breaks into a slick.
- Deglaze while hotPour off the fat but keep the browned juices, and add the gravy boiling so it lifts the fond at once. Scrape the pan while stirring, bring it back to a boil, and stop — prolonged boiling after the flour is cooked just dulls it.
- YieldThe recipe says only that it makes half a pint of gravy, which would be enough for a whole baked pike; no portion count is given.
Pike was a serious table fish in Britain for centuries, prized in medieval and early modern kitchens and still common enough in late Victorian cookery books to warrant its own entries, though it has since largely fallen out of the market on account of its bones and its muddy reputation. Its flesh is lean and dry, which may explain the beef-based gravy: Cassell's is not making a fish sauce at all but a meat gravy. The mention of Bovril, a name not in commercial use until the later 1880s, points to a later edition or printing rather than the earliest. Bottled savoury condiments and commercial meat extracts were increasingly available to households by this date, though how far they displaced the kitchen stockpot is not something this recipe evidences. The costing — "about 2d." — is one of Cassell's habitual touches.