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PIKE, BAKED (another way)
Wash, scale, and empty the fish, and dry it perfectly in every part. Fill it or not with forcemeat, as may be preferred, and skewer it with its tail in its mouth. If the fish is not stuffed, sprinkle a little salt and cayenne in the inside, and place an ounce of butter there. Egg and bread-crumb the fish twice. Season the bread-crumbs with salt and cayenne, and mix with them a third of their quantity in shredded parsley. Pour a little clarified butter over the fish, and bake in a moderate oven. Lay a buttered paper over the dish. Any good fish sauce may be sent to table with pike dressed in this way. Time to bake, thirty to forty minutes for a moderate-sized fish. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward baked whole fish, dressed in the Victorian manner with the tail skewered into the mouth. The only real technical demands are a genuinely dry fish before crumbing and a light hand with the oven.
- Moderate ovenRead this as around 350F (175C); the book gives no temperatures. Check at 30 minutes and take it out when the flesh at the thickest point behind the head flakes cleanly from the backbone, around 145F.
- Dry the fish properlyThis is the hinge. Egg and crumb will not adhere to damp skin, and any surface moisture steams the coating loose in the oven. Pat the fish inside and out and let it sit uncovered on a rack for a few minutes before coating.
- Crumbing twiceThe double coat is deliberate: egg, crumb, then egg and crumb again, which gives a shell thick enough to protect the lean flesh. Use dry crumbs rather than fresh, and mix the parsley in at one third the volume of crumbs as directed.
- Clarified butterThe recipe says only 'a little'; an ounce or two suits a fish of this size. Clarified butter is less liable than whole butter to scorch on a crumb coating, and a neutral oil will do the same job.
- The buttered paperThe recipe says to lay a buttered paper over the dish. A round of buttered parchment laid loosely over the fish keeps the crumbs from darkening before the interior is done; the recipe does not say when to remove it, but taking it off towards the end will let the top colour.
- Sourcing pikeNorthern pike is rarely sold commercially and in many places is a sport fish only. Walleye, whole trout, or a firm white round fish of similar size take this treatment identically. Whatever you use, pike itself is full of fine forked bones along the flanks, so serve it in generous sections rather than trying to fillet it at table.
- Discard the roeWhen emptying the fish, discard the roe. Pike roe has long been reported to act as a violent purgative in some people, and there is no reason to eat it.
- Forcemeat and stuffingThe recipe gives no quantity for the forcemeat. If you stuff the cavity, pack it loosely; a tightly packed cavity slows the centre and the fish overcooks at the shoulders. If you leave it unstuffed, the salt, cayenne and ounce of butter inside are all it needs.
- YieldFive or six as a main course from what the recipe calls a 'moderate-sized' fish; it does not say what weight that means.
Pike was a prestige freshwater fish in Britain for centuries, prized on great-house tables and kept in monastic and manorial fishponds long before sea fish could be moved inland quickly, and older cookery books devote a good deal of space to it: baked, boiled, stuffed, or roasted with a pudding in its belly. The tail skewered into the mouth is a presentation convention of the period, the fish served curled in a ring on the dish rather than laid flat. Cassell's belongs to the later nineteenth century, by which time the railways had made sea fish widely available inland; the entry's 'probable cost, uncertain' reflects the fact that pike was not a regularly priced market fish. The double egg-and-crumb coating and the buttered paper are of a piece with the period's handling of lean fish in dry heat.