Pike
The pike, jack or luce is a dry fish, which is not to be enjoyed unless prepared in grand style, with many rites and gorgeous ceremonies. The following wise receipt is given by Izaak Walton in his Complete Angler: -"First open your pike at the gills, and, if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly. Out of these take his guts, and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small with thyme, sweet-marjoram, and a little winter-savory ; Pike to these put some pickled oysters, and some anchovies, two or three-both these last whole, for the anchovies will melt, and the oysters should not; to these you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well salted. If the pike be more than a yard long, then you may put into these herbs more than a pound, or if he be less, then less butter will suffice: these, being thus mixed, with a blade or two of mace, must be put into the pike's belly : and then his belly so sewed up as to keep all the butter in his belly if it be possible; if not, then as much as you possibly can. But take not off the scales. Then you are to thrust the spit through his mouth, out at his tail. And then take four, or five, or six split sticks, or very thin laths, and a convenient quantity of tape or filleting; these laths are to be tied round about the pike's body pikes from his head to his tail, and the tape tied somewhat thick, to prevent his breaking or falling off from the spit. Let him be roasted very leisurely, and often basted with claret wine, and anchovies and butter mixed together, and also with what moisture falls from him into the pan. When you have roasted him sufficiently, you are to hold under him, when you unwind or cut the tape, that ties him, such a dish as you propose to eat him out of, and let him fall into it with the sauce that is roasted in his belly, and by this means the pike will be kept unbroken and complete. Then, to the sauce which was within, and also that sauce in the pan, you are to add a fit quantity of the best butter, and to squeeze the juice of three or four oranges. Lastly, you may either put it into the pike, with the oysters, two cloves of garlic, and take it whole out when the pike is cut off the spit; or, to give the sauce a hogoo [haut goût], let the dish into which you let the pike fall be rubbed with it; the using or not using of this garlic is left to your discretion. This dish of meat is too good for any but anglers or very honest men; and I Pilchard trust you will prove both, and therefore I have trusted you with this secret."
One part of this receipt cannot now be permitted-the spit. We do not apply steel to fresh fish. The pike must be baked, and this too without neglecting the basting, which is an important point.
There are of course other ways of doing the pike. He may be cut in slices and fried, in which case he is to be eaten with Dutch sauce ; or he may be cut in fillets, and served in most of the ways in which one serves salmon, turbot, and soles. He has even been served in waterzootje; but this does him too much honour. He is not delicate enough. It is much better to go to the other extreme, and dress him in the Chambord style.
Ankham eel and Witham pike In all England is none like.
Walton's pike is a whole stuffed fish roasted in a butter-and-herb parcel of its own skin, and Kettner's editor has already made one substantial amendment to it. A few more are needed.
- Spit to ovenKettner tells you to bake rather than spit-roast, and that is sound. The book gives no temperature; for a whole fish of 3-6 lb, roughly 350-375F and about 10-12 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest part will do, until the flesh at the backbone is opaque throughout (145F is the recommended safe temperature). Walton says only to baste "often" -- every ten minutes or so; the fish has almost no fat of its own.
- Leave the scales onThe recipe is explicit: "take not off the scales." Skin and scales presumably help hold the melted butter and stuffing in while it cooks, though the receipt does not say so or say what becomes of them at table.
- Sourcing the fishPike is not a commercial species in most of the English-speaking world and is largely an angler's fish. Where it cannot be had, a whole walleye, zander or a large trout will take the same treatment, though none is as dry as pike and none needs it as much.
- BonesPike carry Y-shaped intermuscular bones along the flanks in addition to the ribs. Served whole in this style they are unavoidable; warn the table, or reserve the method for people who expect them.
- A pound of butterWalton's pound is the baseline for a pike of about a yard (nearer 12-15 lb than 20), and he tells you plainly to use more if the fish is longer and less if it is shorter. For a 4 lb fish use about 4 oz of butter in the stuffing and another 4 oz for the basting mixture, or the dish becomes a butter sauce with a fish in it.
- Pickled oysters and anchoviesPickled oysters were a standing larder item and are now hard to find; brined or bottled oysters, drained, do the work. The anchovies are salt-cured whole fish meant to dissolve entirely, so two or three tinned fillets, mashed, give the same savoury undertone. Add no further salt until you have tasted.
- Oranges and claretThe three or four oranges were most likely bitter Seville-type rather than modern sweet ones, though sweet oranges were becoming available in England by Walton's day. Use the juice of one Seville, or one lemon plus one small orange, or the sauce turns cloying. The claret is a plain dry red; a cup is enough for the basting.
- Mace and the garlicBlade mace is the dried aril of nutmeg and is sold whole as blades; a pinch of ground mace substitutes. The two cloves of garlic are meant to be fished out whole, or simply rubbed round the serving dish for a trace of what Walton calls a hogoo.
- YieldA 4-5 lb pike dressed this way serves six as a main course. Set the serving dish under the fish as you cut the tapes, exactly as directed; there is no second chance once it breaks.
The receipt is quoted, almost word for word and with open attribution, from Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler of 1653, and it is among the better-known cookery passages in English literature because it is a fisherman's recipe rather than a cook's: it begins at the gills with a knife and treats the fish as something that has just come out of the water. Pike was long an esteemed table fish in England and northern France, valued for firm white flesh and forgiven its dryness and its bones, but it lost commercial ground as sea fish became cheap and reliable to transport. Kettner's compiler, writing in the 1870s, is frankly patronising about it: too coarse for the Flemish waterzootje, better sent to the other extreme and dressed \ grand wine-braised style named for the Loire chateau and usually applied to carp. The couplet at the end is a traditional Lincolnshire boast for the eels of the Ancholme and the pike of the Witham, of the same family as the many local rhymes claiming the best fish in England for one's own river.