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PIKE (a la Venitienne)
Scrape and clean the fish well, remove the inside and cut the fins off. Place the pike whole in a fish-kettle, with half a tumblerful of white wine, two pints of warm water, a bay-leaf, a little whole pepper, a small bunch of parsley, a sliced onion, and salt to taste. Stew over a slow fire for three-quarters of an hour. Let the fish get quite cold in the fish-kettle, then remove it carefully on to a dish. Serve cold with a mayonnaise sauce.
A cold poached whole fish in a simple court bouillon, dressed only with mayonnaise. The one thing to change is the cooking time.
- Three-quarters of an hour is too longModern practice for poached whole fish is roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point, measured from the moment the liquid comes to a bare tremble. A 3 lb pike is done in 20-25 minutes at 160-170F; held at a simmer for 45 minutes the flesh shreds and dries even though it cools in the liquid.
- "Slow fire" means no bubbles"Slow fire" means gentle heat -- The liquid should barely shiver rather than bubble. A rolling boil splits the skin and drives the flesh off the bones, which matters here because the fish has to be lifted out whole and cold.
- Cooling in the liquid is the pointDo not shortcut it. The fish keeps absorbing the wine and aromatics as it cools and firms up enough to move in one piece. Chill it in the kettle, in the fridge once it has stopped steaming.
- Half a tumblerfulA Victorian tumbler is usually reckoned at around 8-10 fl oz, so this is roughly 4-5 fl oz of dry white wine to 2 pints of water (two imperial pints is about 5 US cups). Anything crisp and unoaked works.
- No fish kettleA deep roasting pan on the hob across two burners does the job, or a wide braiser. Line it with a doubled sheet of cheesecloth or parchment with the ends hanging out, so you have handles to lift the fish clear without breaking it.
- Sourcing pikeNorthern pike is largely a sport fish and rarely sold; it also carries the notorious row of forked "Y-bones" along the flanks, which is easier to deal with once the fish is cold. Walleye, zander, whole trout or a small striped bass all poach the same way.
- The mayonnaiseCassell's assumes a hand-made mayonnaise, thick enough to sit on the fish rather than run off it. A little of the strained poaching liquid, reduced and cooled, loosens it and ties the sauce to the dish.
- YieldA 3 lb fish serves four as a main course, six as a first course or part of a cold table.
In nineteenth-century French-influenced kitchens à la vénitienne usually meant a pale green sauce of white wine, herb butter and chervil or tarragon, so Cassell's cold version with mayonnaise is a loose use of the term — the sort of drift that happened as French menu language passed into English household books. What the recipe does preserve is the older logic of the court bouillon: fish cooked in a seasoned, wine-acidulated liquid and left to cool in it, a technique that predates refrigeration and was as much about keeping the fish presentable for a cold buffet as about flavour. Pike held a place in medieval and Renaissance fish cookery and remains the base of French quenelles de brochet. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is an enormous compilation of the turn of the century, and it treats freshwater fish as a matter of course in a way that supermarket-era cookbooks no longer do.