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Pike, Potted
Cut off the head and tail, cleanse and scale the fish, split it open all the way down, and take out the bones. Wipe it dry, sprinkle bay salt and cayenne over the inside, and roll it tightly. Put it into a jar, and lay little pieces of butter here and there upon it. Lay a buttered paper over it, and bake in a moderate oven until it is done enough. Take it up, drain it, and when it is cold put it into a pot just large enough to contain it, and cover with clarified butter. Time to bake, according to the size: thirty to forty minutes for a moderate-sized fish; one hour or more for a large one. Probable cost, uncertain.
A late-Victorian potted fish: baked in its own butter, pressed into a pot, sealed under more butter. The technique is sound, but the storage assumptions belong to a cold stone larder.
- Treat the butter seal as flavour, not preservationA layer of clarified butter over cooked fish creates an airless environment at room temperature, which is precisely the wrong condition for a low-acid protein. Keep the finished pot refrigerated, and eat it within three or four days rather than the weeks the Victorians expected.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read this as somewhere around 350F (175C). The recipe itself scales by size alone: thirty to forty minutes for a moderate-sized fish, an hour or more for a large one.
- "Done enough"The flesh should be opaque and flake cleanly at the thickest part of the roll, around 145F on an instant-read thermometer. Overbaking is the main failure here, since the fish is then pressed and chilled and will dry further.
- Bay saltCoarse salt made by solar evaporation of sea water. Any coarse sea salt or kosher salt stands in; as a rough guide, about a teaspoon per pound of fillet, scattered over the inside before rolling.
- The jarProbably a stoneware or earthenware baking jar. A deep ovenproof dish or a loaf tin does the same job; the point is that the fish sits snugly and cooks in its own butter and juices rather than spreading out.
- Boning a pikePike carries a row of fine Y-shaped intramuscular bones in addition to the frame. Splitting and lifting the backbone will not remove them; they run in a line along the upper fillet and generally have to be cut out as a strip before salting, or the potted fish is unpleasant to eat.
- Clarifying the butterMelt unsalted butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat, leaving the milk solids behind. Milk solids in the seal spoil quickly and will cloud and sour the surface.
- Yield and servingA three-pound pike should give roughly enough potted fish for six to eight as a starter. Serve at cool room temperature with toast; take it out of the refrigerator twenty minutes ahead so the butter is not brittle.
Potting was the English kitchen's answer to keeping cooked flesh through the week: meat, game or fish was seasoned, baked until dry, packed tight to exclude air, and sealed with a cap of clarified butter, a method well established in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century household books long before Cassell's collected it. Pike itself was a prestige freshwater fish in Britain, taken from rivers and mill pools and celebrated by Izaak Walton, who devoted a chapter of The Compleat Angler to it; but it is bony and its flesh can be dry, which made it a natural candidate for potting, where butter supplies what the fish lacks. The frank note that the cost is "uncertain" tells you the fish was not reliably a market commodity but something caught, given or bought by chance, in contrast to the priced entries around it.