Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pike, Crimped
Pike, Crimped
Take a very fresh pike of a good size. Cleanse and scale it, and cut it up, as soon as possible after it is dead, into slices about half an inch thick. Lay these in very cold spring water to crimp them. Put them into boiling salted water, and let them boil gently until they are done enough. Take them up immediately, and serve on a hot dish, with any of the sauces recommended in the recipe, PIKE, SAUCES FOR. Slices of pike crimped in this way may be dipped in egg and bread-crumbs, and fried as well as boiled. They will be found excellent. Time to boil, twenty minutes. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A short recipe that depends almost entirely on one condition the modern shopper rarely meets: the fish must be freshly killed. Everything else is straightforward, though the boiling time needs cutting hard.
- What crimping actually isSlicing a fish before rigor sets in and plunging the cuts into ice-cold water makes the muscle contract sharply, giving a firm, flaky texture rather than a soft one. It works only on a very freshly killed fish; a chilled fillet from a counter has already passed through rigor and will simply soak.
- Twenty minutes is far too longHalf-inch slices of a lean freshwater fish are cooked in roughly four to six minutes at a bare simmer. Twenty minutes will leave the flesh dry and cottony. Test at the bone: it should part cleanly. Wild freshwater fish should be cooked through, to about 145F at the thickest point.
- Gently means gentlyDrop the slices into water that is at a full boil, then immediately pull it back to a shiver. A rolling boil breaks the crimped slices apart, which defeats the point of crimping them.
- Salt the water properlyThe original assumes the cook knows the ratio. Around 1 oz salt per quart (very roughly 2 tablespoons per litre) is a strength often given for boiled fish in period books; less and the flesh tastes washed out.
- The bonesPike carries a row of forked intramuscular Y-bones along the upper fillet that no amount of slicing removes. Serving cross-cut slices, as here, leaves them in place, and diners should be warned. Many modern cooks instead fillet, remove the Y-bone strip, and accept the loss.
- SourcingPike is not sold commercially in most places and is generally an angler's fish. Pike-perch, walleye or zander behave similarly and are more likely to be found; any firm lean freshwater fish will take the same treatment, though only a very fresh one will crimp.
- The fried versionFor the egg-and-crumb variant, drain and dry the crimped slices thoroughly before coating, and shallow-fry in clarified butter or a neutral oil at about 350F, three minutes a side. Wet slices shed their crumbs.
- Yield"Six or seven persons" suggests a pike of perhaps 4-5 lb whole, served as one course among several. As a main course today, reckon on the same fish feeding four.
Crimping was a standard technique in British fish cookery from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth, applied above all to cod, salmon and skate, and it belongs to a world where fish arrived alive or barely dead. Cookery writers of the period repeat the instruction that the fish must be cut "as soon as possible after it is dead" because the effect depends on catching the muscle before rigor mortis; the cold water shock was widely believed to produce the firm, curdy flake that was then the mark of well-cooked fish. Pike itself was a prestige freshwater fish in medieval and early modern England, farmed in monastic and manorial stew ponds and priced accordingly, which may perhaps be why Cassell's declines to guess at the cost and simply writes "uncertain" -- though that connection is speculative, and by the period of the book pike had become as much the angler's fish as the market's. Its reputation has always been divided: fine, sweet flesh, and a bone structure that has defeated cooks for centuries.Cassell's solves the problem here by not mentioning it.