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Pike, Larded and Baked
Clean and lard a moderate-sized pike as in the next recipe. Stuff it or not, and skewer it with its tail in its mouth. Butter a baking-dish, lay the fish in it, season with salt and cayenne, and pour in half a pint or more of flour and water. Lay little pieces of butter here and there upon the fish, and bake in a moderate oven. When it is half done strew highly seasoned bread-crumbs over it, baste occasionally, and bake until it is lightly browned. When it is done enough, lift it carefully on to a hot dish, squeeze a little lemon-juice over it, and send piquant, Dutch, or caper sauce to table in a tureen. Time to bake, thirty to forty minutes for a moderate-sized fish. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A late-Victorian treatment of a lean freshwater fish that dries out badly without help. Everything in the method — the larding, the butter, the flour-and-water in the dish — exists to keep the flesh moist.
- Larding, and what to do insteadLarding means threading strips of firm pork back fat through the surface of the flesh with a larding needle. Cold fatty bacon cut into thin lardoons works if you have the needle; if you do not, lay thin bacon or barded fat over the fish — it will baste and protect the surface, though it will not put fat inside the flesh.
- The flour and waterThe book is British, so half a pint is 10 fluid ounces — about a cup and a quarter. The mixture is a thin slurry rather than a batter: it sits under the fish, keeps the bottom from scorching, and thickens slightly into a basting liquid. Whisk it smooth before pouring or it will set into lumps.
- Moderate ovenRead as somewhere around 325-350F. The thirty to forty minutes given suits a moderate-sized fish of perhaps 3 lb; check at thirty.
- DonenessPike is done when the thickest part reaches 145F and the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone. Overcooked pike turns cottony, which is exactly what the larding is meant to prevent.
- Tail in mouthSkewering the tail into the mouth is the old presentation the French called en colère. It is purely for the table; a straight fish bakes just as well.
- Pike bonesPike carry a row of Y-shaped intramuscular bones along the upper fillet that no amount of cooking dissolves. Warn the table, or have the fishmonger fillet and pin-bone the fish and bake it as a stuffed roll instead.
- The crumbs"Highly seasoned bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs worked with salt, pepper and cayenne; chopped parsley, thyme or lemon zest are common additions. Adding them at the halfway point keeps them from burning during the full bake.
- The saucesDutch sauce is the Victorian name for what is now called hollandaise; piquant sauce is a reduced vinegar-and-shallot brown sauce with gherkins; caper sauce is a butter or bechamel sauce with capers and their vinegar. Any of the three would be made separately and sent in a tureen.
- YieldSix or seven as written assumes fish as one course among several. Treated as a main course, a 3 lb pike serves four.
Pike was a serious dish in British kitchens for centuries before it slipped off the menu — Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler famously called a well-dressed pike "too good for any but anglers, or very honest men," and his roasting recipe, stuffed and stitched shut, is at least a distant relative of the stuffing and skewering here. The flesh is very lean and very white, which is why almost every historical treatment involves fat introduced by force: larding, barding, butter, or a rich sauce poured over. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the later nineteenth century, pike was becoming a country-house and angler's fish rather than a market one. The three sauces offered — piquant, Dutch, caper — are all sharp or acidic, which may reflect a common view of pike as slightly muddy in flavour.