Home › The Principles of Cookery › PIKE, BOILED (another way)
PIKE, BOILED (another way)
Take a pike weighing three or four pounds, which has been kept in a cool larder for two days. Cleanse it thoroughly, remove the gills, and skewer it in a ring, with its tail in its mouth. Put it in a well-tinned fish-kettle, cover with court bouillon (see PIKE, A LA GENEVOISE; also COURT BOUILLON, WITH WINE), and let it boil gently for forty minutes. Lift it from the fire, and leave it in the liquid until the next day. Half an hour before the pike is to be served, take it up carefully, drain it, preserve the liquid, and clean the kettle thoroughly. Put the fish and the bouillon back into the pan, and stew gently for twenty minutes. Drain the fish, dish it on a napkin, and send caper sauce to table in a tureen. Pike dressed in this way may be eaten cold with mayonnaise sauce. Of course, if desired, the pike may be boiled in court bouillon and served the same day, but the taste of a fish thus dressed is not to be compared with one which has been allowed to soak in the liquid for several hours. Sufficient for two or three persons. Probable cost, uncertain.
A Victorian cold-buffet fish, written for a kettle and a larder rather than a hob and a fridge. Two things need rethinking: the length of the cooking and where the fish sits overnight.
- The hinge: stop boiling itForty minutes at a boil, then twenty more the next day, will reduce a 3–4 lb pike to cotton wool. Bring the court bouillon to a bare shiver (170–180F, no rolling bubbles), slide the fish in, and give it roughly 8–10 minutes per inch of thickness — about 20–25 minutes for a fish this size. It is done when the flesh at the thickest point parts from the backbone.
- Cooling in the liquidThe soaking is the point of the recipe and does genuinely improve the flavour, but a cooked fish must not spend the night in a warm room. Cool the kettle quickly — a sinkful of iced water helps — and refrigerate as soon as it is below hand-warm. The same goes for the two days' hanging in a "cool larder" at the start: a modern fridge does that job, and fish bought today needs no ageing at all.
- ReheatingIf serving hot, lift the fish and warm it through in the strained bouillon for 5–8 minutes, no longer. The instruction to clean the kettle between stages is sound practice, not fussiness.
- Court bouillonThe cross-references assume you have one to hand. In practice: water and dry white wine roughly 3:1, with sliced onion and carrot, a bay leaf, parsley stalks, a few peppercorns and a good pinch of salt, simmered 20 minutes before the fish goes in. Enough to cover the fish in the pan.
- "Well-tinned fish-kettle"The warning is about bare copper reacting with the wine and vinegar in the bouillon. Any stainless or enamelled roasting tin deep enough to hold liquid, covered with foil, will do; a fish kettle is convenient but not required.
- Skewered in a ringA Victorian presentation: the tail brought round to the mouth and held with a metal skewer. It may also help keep the fish from curling unevenly in the pan. Skip it and cook the fish straight if you would rather carve neat portions.
- Sourcing pikePike is not sold in most shops and in Britain and much of the US it is a rod-caught freshwater fish subject to local fishing rules. Zander, walleye, carp or a firm cod or hake fillet all take the same treatment. Pike is also notorious for its Y-shaped intramuscular bones; warn anyone at the table.
- Yield'Two or three persons' reads conservatively by modern standards. A 3–4 lb whole fish will serve four to six as a main dish.
- To finishCaper sauce here means a white sauce or melted-butter sauce with capers and a little of their vinegar. Cold, mayonnaise thinned with lemon is the better of the two options and the reason to make the dish a day ahead.
Pike was a prestige freshwater fish in European kitchens long before it fell out of British favour — monastery and manor fishponds stocked it, and Izaak Walton called it the tyrant of the fresh waters. Its firm, bone-riddled flesh made it the classic base for quenelles in French cookery and, poached whole in court bouillon, a standard cold entrée on nineteenth-century buffet tables, where a fish curled tail-in-mouth on a folded napkin was as much a set piece as a jelly or a raised pie. Cassell's dictionary, compiled at a time when a well-appointed household still had a game larder and access to river fish, treats it as an unremarkable everyday ingredient; the note "probable cost, uncertain" is one Cassell's applies to a range of items whose price varied. The insistence on letting the fish soak overnight in its cooking liquid is sound cooking sense — the gelatine and aromatics set into the flesh as it cools — and survives today in the way salmon and trout are still cooled in their poaching liquor.