Pike, Baked
INGREDIENTS.-1 or 2 pike, a nice delicate stuffing (see FORCE- MEATS). 1 egg, bread-crumbs, 1/4 lb. of butter.
Scale the fish, take out the gills, wash and wipe it thoroughly dry; stuff it with forcemeat, sew it up, and fasten the tail in the mouth by means of a skewer; brush it over with egg, sprinkle with breadcrumbs and baste with butter before putting it in the oven, which must be well heated. When the pike is of a nice brown colour, cover it with buttered paper, as the outside would become too dry. If 2 are dressed, a little variety may be made by making one of them green with a little chopped parsley mixed with the breadcrumbs. Serve anchovy or Dutch sauce and plain melted butter with it. less.
TIME. According to size, 1 hour, more or SEASONABLE from September to March.
Note.-Pike à la génévèse may be stewed in the same manner as salmon à la génévèse.
A whole stuffed pike, roasted hot and then shielded with paper. The method suits any large lean freshwater or white fish, and the technique matters more than the species.
- Oven heat"Well heated" implies a genuinely hot oven, and something in the region of 400-425F is a reasonable modern equivalent for setting the crumb coating and colouring the skin; the book gives no temperatures, and the reduction in heat once the paper goes on is a modern suggestion rather than an instruction of the recipe.
- The buttered paperThis is the hinge of the recipe. Pike is very lean and its crumbed surface will scorch long before a 3–4 lb fish is cooked through, so the paper (baking parchment now, buttered on the underside) goes on the moment the crust is brown, not later.
- Butter quantityThe amount of butter has lost its fraction in this printing; the ingredient line reads simply "lb. of butter." A quarter pound is ample for a fish of moderate size.
- TimingAn hour is the recipe's own guide, "according to size." Judge by the flesh parting cleanly from the backbone; if using a thermometer, current guidance for fish is 145F at the thickest part, and freshwater fish should not be pulled rare. Overcooked pike turns cottony.
- BonesPike carries Y-shaped intermuscular bones that no amount of cooking softens. Warn anyone at the table, or fillet and pin-bone the fish and bake the stuffing in a separate roll.
- Tail in the mouthSkewering the tail into the mouth is presentation, not cookery. A straight fish on a long dish is easier to serve and cooks more evenly.
- The saucesDutch sauce is Beeton's hollandaise — egg yolks, butter, vinegar or lemon. Anchovy sauce is a melted-butter sauce sharpened with anchovy essence; a little anchovy paste whisked into beurre blanc gives the same effect.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a 3-4 lb pike with forcemeat will serve perhaps four to six.
Pike was a prized table fish in Britain long before it became chiefly an angler's trophy — medieval and early modern households stocked stew ponds with it, and it appears in English cookery books as a dish for company well into the nineteenth century. Its leanness and firm flesh made it a natural candidate for stuffing and roasting whole, a treatment applied to it since at least Izaak Walton's day; Walton's own directions in The Compleat Angler pack the fish with butter, herbs and oysters and are often cited as the ancestor of recipes like this one. The September-to-March season is sometimes explained by a close season on coarse fish, though the fish's condition and spawning may account for it as readily. The note on génévèse sauce points to the Genevan-style treatment that Victorian kitchens applied to salmon, to which the recipe cross-refers.