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Boned Baked Pickerel
Remove the backbone and all the other bones which you can extract without tearing the fish too much. Lay in olive oil and lemon juice for an hour. Place very thin slices of salt pork on the grating of the bakepan, lay the fish, skin side downward, on top of the salt pork, and wash with melted butter. Cover the pan, bake forty minutes, basting it once. Serve with Hollandaise sauce.
A whole small pike boned and baked on a bed of salt pork, from the era when a covered bakepan with a wire grating did the work of a roasting rack. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first thing to settle.
- Oven temperatureUnstated in the original. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, is a reasonable modern default; anything hotter risks drying the flesh before the salt pork has rendered.
- Time is too longForty minutes suits a 3 lb fish at most, and even then only just. Bake to temperature rather than by the clock: standard guidance for fish is 145F at the thickest part, which for a boned 1-2 lb pickerel may be only 15-20 minutes.
- What pickerel meansIn nineteenth-century American cookbooks it is a small pike; in the Great Lakes and Canada the same word is still used for walleye. Either works, as will any firm freshwater fish of similar size. Both are lean, which is why the recipe surrounds them with fat.
- Boning the fishButterfly it: cut down each side of the backbone from the inside, lift the spine out, then run a fingertip along the flesh to find the pin bones and pull them with tweezers. Leave the skin whole, since it holds the fish together during baking.
- The marinadeOne hour in olive oil and lemon juice is plenty. Longer and the acid begins to firm and whiten the surface of the flesh the way ceviche does, which spoils the texture after baking.
- Salt porkSlice it as thin as you can manage, or substitute unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta. It acts as both rack and basting fat. Rinse the pork if it is heavily cured, and salt the fish lightly or not at all.
- Covered panA lid means the fish part-steams rather than browns. If you want colour, take the cover off for the last five minutes, or finish briefly under the broiler.
- HollandaiseMake it after the fish goes in, hold it off the heat over warm water, and do not let it climb above about 150F or it will split. It will not wait long, so serve as soon as the fish is out.
- YieldA 2-3 lb fish prepared this way serves three or four as a main course.