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Pike, Cold, Re-Dressed
Take the remains of a dressed pike, and cut the flesh into neat slices. Season with salt and cayenne, and fry in hot fat until the slices are lightly browned. Drain them from the fat, and dish them neatly. Send to table on a hot dish, with a sauce prepared as follows. Mix smoothly in a stewpan two ounces of fresh butter with an ounce of flour. Add a little pepper and salt, the eighth of a nutmeg, grated, a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, and a table-spoonful of shredded parsley. Pour in half a pint of milk, and stir the sauce over the fire until it is on the point of boiling. Just before sending to table, stir half an ounce of butter into it until it is dissolved. Time, ten minutes to fry the slices. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold fish. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A leftovers dish from a period when cold cooked fish was a routine thing to have in the larder. The sauce is a straightforward butter-flour-milk sauce with lemon and parsley, and it is where most of the interest lies.
- The frying time is the thing to ignoreTen minutes is far too long for fish that is already cooked; the slices only need enough heat to colour the outside, roughly a minute or two a side in hot fat. Any longer and pike, which is lean and dry to begin with, turns to cotton wool.
- Half a pintIn an English book of this date that is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. With 1 oz of flour to that quantity of milk the sauce will be on the thick side by the period's usual proportions; add the milk gradually and stop when the consistency suits the dish.
- Butter and flour proportionsTwo ounces of butter to one of flour is a fat-heavy roux by modern habit; it will look greasy as it cooks and then come together. Keep it over gentle heat and do not let it brown, as the sauce is meant to stay pale.
- \The sauce is taken only to the point of boiling, which is barely enough to cook out the flour's raw taste. Give it two or three minutes at a bare simmer, stirring, before the final half-ounce of butter goes in off the heat.
- NutmegAn eighth of a whole nutmeg is roughly a quarter teaspoon freshly grated. Pre-ground nutmeg is weaker and flatter; grate it if you can.
- Finding pikePike is rarely sold commercially in Britain or the United States and is full of fine intramuscular Y-bones that need patient picking. Any firm cooked white fish stands in well — cod, haddock, hake, or walleye.
- Leftover fishCooked fish should be refrigerated promptly and used within a day or two, and reheated right through rather than merely warmed at the surface. The original assumes a cold larder and a same-week household economy that no longer applies.
- YieldTwo to three servings as written, from perhaps 12 oz to 1 lb of picked cooked fish. "Probable cost, 6d." is a Victorian retail price and of no practical use beyond showing how cheap the dish was meant to be.
Cassell's ran a long series of "re-dressed" entries — cold beef, cold fowl, cold fish given a fried or scalloped second life with a sauce over it — and they are one of the clearest signs of how a Victorian middle-class kitchen actually worked. Joints and whole fish were bought and cooked large, then carried through several meals, and it is often said that a cook's competence was judged partly on making the second appearance look deliberate rather than apologetic. Pike itself is a freshwater predator long taken from English rivers and ponds and treated as a serious table fish: Izaak Walton devoted a well-known passage in The Compleat Angler (1653) to stuffing and baking one. Its reputation later declined, partly because of the bones and partly because pond-caught fish could taste muddy, which may help explain why strongly flavoured accompaniments — cayenne, nutmeg, lemon — recur so often in historical pike recipes.