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PIKE (Izaak Walton's mode of dressing)
"First open your pike at the gills, and, if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly. Out of these take his guts, and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small, with thyme, sweet marjoram, and a little winter savory; to these put some pickled oysters and some anchovies, two or three, both these last whole, for the anchovies will melt and the oysters should not; to these you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well salted. If the pike be more than a yard long, then you may put into these herbs more than a pound, or if he be less, then less butter will suffice; these being thus mixed with a blade or two of mace, must be put into the pike's belly; and then his belly so sewed up as to keep all the butter in the belly, if it be possible; if not, then as much as you possibly can. But take not off the scales. Then you are to thrust the spit through his mouth, out at his tail. And then take four, or five, or six split sticks or very thin laths, and a convenient quantity of tape or filleting; these laths are to be tied round about the pike's body from his head to his tail, and the tape tied somewhat thick, to prevent his breaking or falling off from the spit. Let him be roasted very leisurely, and often basted with claret wine, and anchovies and butter mixed together, and also with what moisture falls from him into the pan. When you have roasted him sufficiently, you are to hold under him, when you unwind or cut the tape that ties him, such a dish as you propose to eat him out of, and let him fall into it, with the sauce that is roasted in his belly, and by this means the pike will be kept unbroken and complete. Then, to the sauce which was within, and also that sauce in the pan, you are to add a fit quantity of the best butter, and to squeeze the juice of three or four oranges. Lastly, you may either put it into the pike, with the oysters, two cloves of garlic, and take it whole out when the pike is cut off the spit; or to give the sauce a haut gout, let the dish into which you let the pike fall be rubbed with it; the using or not using of this garlic is left to your discretion. This dish of meat," says honest Izaak to his companion, "is too good for any but anglers, or very honest men; and I trust you will prove both, and, therefore, I have trusted you with this secret."
Walton's pike is a spit-roasted whole fish stuffed with a compound butter, and it survives in Cassell's as much for its charm as for its practicality. The method translates to an oven, but the proportions need reading with a cold eye.
- The hinge: keep the butter insideThe sewn belly, the scales left on and the laths bound round the fish all work to hold a melting pound of butter in place until it can be tipped out as sauce. Sew the cavity closed with a trussing needle and butcher's twine and lay the fish on its side rather than upright, so leakage collects under it and not in the fire.
- Spit to oven"Roasted very leisurely" means slow turning before a fire; the recipe gives no oven equivalent, but a moderate oven of about 325-350F is a reasonable modern stand-in. A pike of 3-4 lb needs roughly 35-45 minutes; the flesh should just flake from the backbone. Baste every ten minutes with the claret, anchovy and butter mixture as directed.
- Size, and the butterA pike "more than a yard long" is a fish of perhaps 12-18 lb and will not fit a domestic oven. For a 3-4 lb pike, 4-6 oz of butter is ample; a full pound belongs to Walton's river monster. Scale the herbs and oysters down in the same proportion.
- Sourcing the fishPike is rarely sold commercially in the US and is mostly an angler's fish, as Walton intended. Walleye, zander or a whole trout of similar weight take the same treatment. Pike carries fine forked Y-bones along the flanks that no filleting removes cleanly, which is one reason it was traditionally served whole and eaten carefully.
- Pickled oysters and anchoviesPickled oysters were a standard larder item, kept in their own liquor with vinegar and spice; jarred or canned oysters with a splash of cider vinegar stand in. The anchovies go in whole because they are meant to dissolve into the butter and season the whole cavity, and salted anchovy fillets in oil do the job. Given the anchovies, oysters and pickle, add salt only at the end.
- Mace, and the herbsA "blade" of mace is one piece of the dried aril of nutmeg; two blades is somewhere in the region of a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace, though the whole blades are easier to fish out. Winter savory is the perennial, more resinous than summer savory; either works, and thyme with marjoram alone is no disaster.
- The orangesThree or four oranges in the 17th century usually meant bitter Seville oranges, sour and highly aromatic. Modern sweet oranges will make the sauce cloying; use the juice of one orange with a lemon, or a Seville if you can find one in season.
- Haut gout and the garlic"Haut gout" here simply means a high, pronounced savour. Walton's alternative to putting garlic in the sauce, rubbing the serving dish with a cut clove, gives a very faint perfume and is worth following if the fish is delicate.
- YieldA 3-4 lb pike dressed this way serves four, with the pan sauce poured over. Serve it with bread or plain boiled potatoes; the sauce is rich enough to need nothing else.
This is the celebrated pike recipe from Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653), reproduced in Cassell's almost word for word, closing quotation and all. Walton, a London ironmonger turned biographer and fisherman, presented his book as a dialogue between an angler and his pupil, and the cookery in it is offered as part of the angler's craft rather than the cook's: the fish is cleaned at the gills so the body stays whole, bound to the spit with laths and tape, and tipped from spit to dish unbroken. The abundant butter, the anchovy and oyster seasoning, the mace and the sour orange juice are all thoroughly of their century, when fish was expected to be pushed toward richness and sharpness at once rather than left plain. Pike was a prized freshwater fish in England for centuries, farmed in monastic and manorial stew ponds, and its reputation as a difficult, bony creature is exactly why Walton makes a ceremony of serving it whole. Victorian editors like Cassell's kept the passage partly for use and partly for its flavour of antiquity, and the joke at the end, that the dish is too good for any but anglers or very honest men, is Walton's own.