Baked Pickerel
Clean and wash a large fine pickerel. Lay it on the grating of your baking-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, butter well, and dredge with flour. Place in a hot oven, and when the flour begins to brown, baste with butter, water, and lemon juice.
Allow twelve minutes to each pound of fish. Serve with oyster sauce.
A plain baked whole fish, cooked hot and fast on a rack so the skin crisps rather than steams. The only real judgment call is when to stop.
- PickerelUsage varies: in the United States it generally means the chain pickerel, a small relative of the pike; in Canada it is often applied to the walleye; in Britain to a small or young pike. Any firm lean freshwater fish works — walleye, pike, perch, or a whole trout or bass of 2-4 lb.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. The high heat is what sets the floured skin before the flesh dries out; a moderate oven will give you a pale, slack exterior.
- The gratingPeriod baking-pans were often sold with a removable rack or trivet of this kind. Use a wire rack set in a sheet pan, oiled well, or lay the fish on a bed of coarsely sliced onion so it does not stick.
- Twelve minutes to the poundGenerous for a slim fish. Judge by thickness instead — about 10 minutes per inch at the deepest point — and look for the flesh to just part from the backbone. Standard food-safety guidance for fish is 145F internal; pulling it cooler is a matter of taste, not a safe temperature, and wild freshwater fish is best taken to 145F.
- BastingMelted butter with a splash of water and lemon, brushed on two or three times. Do not flood the pan; standing liquid steams the underside and undoes the dredging.
- Oyster sauceNot the bottled Cantonese condiment. The period sauce is a white or cream sauce with shucked oysters and their liquor warmed through — two minutes at most, until the edges just ruffle. Longer and they turn to rubber.
- BonesPike and pickerel carry fine Y-bones along the upper flank; walleye does not. Serve in sections lifted off the frame rather than cross-cut steaks, and warn the table.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves three to four as a main course.
Baked whole freshwater fish is a common feature of nineteenth-century American home cookery, in part because pike, pickerel, perch and walleye were caught locally and sold or brought home whole, while saltwater fish generally reached inland towns salted or packed in ice. Collections of this kind, assembled from contributed and reprinted receipts, often give a lean-fish bake in much this form: rack, flour dredge, hot oven, butter baste, and a rich sauce to offset the fish's own leanness. Oyster sauce was one of the usual dressings for baked and boiled fish in the period, oysters being relatively cheap and shipped in barrels inland; how often it turns up on fish pages suggests how ordinary an ingredient they then were.