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Pike, Stuffing For
Take as many finely-grated bread-crumbs as will two-thirds fill the body of the pike. Make up the other third with finely-shredded beef suet, and add a liberal seasoning of pepper and salt, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, the rind of half a lemon finely-minced, and a tea-spoonful of fennel and chervil. Moisten the mixture with the yolks of one or two eggs. When mushrooms are in season, half a dozen button mushrooms may be minced and added to the rest. Or beard and mince a dozen oysters. Mix with them four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, three ounces of shredded suet, a dessert-spoonful of minced savoury herbs, and a little salt, cayenne, and grated nutmeg. Moisten the whole with the yolk of an egg and the liquor from the oysters, and mix the ingredients till they form a smooth paste. The body of the pike should be wiped dry with a soft cloth before the stuffing is put into it, and it should then be sewed up securely with soft cotton. When a larger quantity of stuffing has been made than is required to fill the fish, it may be made into cakes, which should be fried in butter, and used for garnishing.
Two stuffings in one entry: a plain suet-and-herb forcemeat measured by the cavity of the fish, and an oyster version measured by weight. Both are bound with raw yolk and cooked inside the fish, so the fish has to reach temperature for the stuffing to be safe.
- Quantity by volumeThe first version gives no weights at all — you fill the cavity two-thirds with crumbs, one-third with suet, so the amount depends entirely on the size of the fish. The oyster version states its proportions plainly at 4 oz crumbs to 3 oz suet, a rather fattier ratio than two-thirds to one-third.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons. The "tea-spoonful of fennel and chervil" is presumably the two chopped herbs taken together rather than fennel seed, though the recipe does not say.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, sold shredded in some butchers and supermarkets. Frozen grated butter is one common substitute; it melts faster and gives a softer, less open forcemeat.
- Bearding oystersTo beard is to trim off the dark frilled gill margin, which stays tough. Reserve the liquor as the recipe says — it does most of the seasoning work in that version.
- Don't overfillCrumb stuffing swells. Pack the cavity loosely to about three-quarters and the fish will not split its seam in the oven; the surplus goes into the fried garnish cakes the recipe suggests.
- Sewing upPlain cotton kitchen twine, or wooden skewers laced with twine. Count the stitches so you can find them all again before serving.
- Oven and donenessThe entry covers only the stuffing and gives no baking directions. If you bake the stuffed fish, 350–375F and roughly 12–15 minutes per inch at the thickest point is a modern rule of thumb rather than anything the book states. Test the centre of the stuffing, not the fish: it should reach 165F because of the raw yolk and, in the second version, the oysters. The flesh alone is done at 145F, which a stuffed fish will pass long before the middle catches up.
- About the fishPike is bony, with a row of forked intramuscular bones along the flanks that no amount of stuffing disguises. Where pike is not sold, a whole trout, walleye or sea bass of similar size takes either stuffing well; scale up or down by cavity volume.
- YieldThe recipe gives no fish size or serving count: the first stuffing is measured against whatever pike you have, while the second is fixed at 4 oz crumbs, 3 oz suet and a dozen oysters, with any surplus going to the garnish cakes.
Roast stuffed pike is a long-established English fish dish, and the version most often quoted is Izaak Walton's in The Compleat Angler (1653), which stuffs the fish with sweet herbs, oysters, anchovies and butter and concludes that the dish is "too good for any but anglers, or very honest men." Cassell's entry is the domesticated descendant of that line: the oysters and nutmeg survive, but the anchovy and claret have given way to breadcrumbs and suet, the standard Victorian forcemeat base used for everything from veal to turkey. Pike was a river and lake fish of some standing in Britain ororial estates for centuries but it is lean and notoriously bony, which is precisely why the tradition is to pack it with fat: the suet bastes the flesh from the inside while the crumbs absorb what cooks out. Presenting the surplus as fried cakes around the dish is a thoroughly nineteenth-century habit, the same economy that turned leftover forcemeat into garnish rather than waste.