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Baked Pike
Scale and clean a pike, cut it into slices and place itin a bakingdish; put in some slices of onion, two bay leaves, a piece of butter, some pepper and salt, and one-half pint of sour cream. Bake it for twenty-five minutes in a brisk oven, basting often with the cream. Strew some breadcrumbs and grated Parmesan cheese over the fish, and brown it under a salamander. Place the slices of fish on a hot dish, pour some broth in the baking dish, add some lemon juice, salt and pepper, stir it for a minute or two on the fire, then pour it over the fish and serve.
Boiled Pike, Dubois Select a gold-coated pike weighing six or seven pounds, scale and draw it, truss the head and wash it well. Make incisions across the back as deep as the spine bone, place the fish on its belly in the fishkettle, cover with white wine and water mixed in equal quantities, add a few minced vegetables, a bunch of sweet herbs and parsley, four or five peppercorns and a little salt, bring to a boil and simmer over a slow fire for an hour. Prepare a good sauce with one pint of fish sauce strained and cooled, thicken it with flour and butter kneaded together, add two tablespoonfuls of soy and five tablespoonfuls of butter broken into small pieces. Drain the fish, place it on a folded napkin on a hot dish, or an ornamental dish-paper, garnish with nice little sprigs of fresh parsley and serve with the sauce in a sauceboat.
Two pike recipes run together here: a quick baked version finished under the broiler, and Urbain Dubois's whole poached fish. Both assume a cook who can handle a bony freshwater fish and a hot grill.
- "Fish sauce" is not fish sauceIn the boiled pike, the pint of "fish sauce" most likely means the strained cooking liquor from the kettle, used as the base; the text says only "strained and cooled," not reduced. It has nothing to do with Southeast Asian nam pla. The two tablespoons of "soy" later in the same sauce are almost certainly soy sauce, used as a coloring and seasoning much as Victorian kitchens used mushroom ketchup.
- SalamanderAn overhead radiant grill, historically a heated iron disc on a handle held above the dish. Your broiler on high, with the dish six inches below the element, does the same work in two or three minutes.
- Brisk ovenRoughly 400-450F. At that heat, twenty-five minutes suits thick cutlets from a large pike; slices from a two- or three-pound fish will be done in twelve to fifteen, when the flesh flakes at the backbone.
- Half a pint of sour creamOne cup. Full-fat cultured sour cream is what is wanted; low-fat versions break and weep under a hot oven. Baste as directed or the exposed surface dries before the interior sets.
- An hour is too longA six- or seven-pound pike poached whole needs roughly 10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder, which for most fish of that size is 30 to 40 minutes at a bare shiver, not a full hour. The deep incisions across the back that Dubois specifies help the heat reach the spine without prolonged cooking.
- Pike bonesNorthern pike carry rows of Y-shaped intramuscular bones along the flanks in addition to the ribs. Slicing across the fish, as the baked version does, leaves them in place; warn anyone at the table, or have a filleted and pin-boned side ready instead.
- Kneaded butter and flourBeurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the simmering liquid in small pellets. The recipe does not say when the final five tablespoons of butter go in; standard practice is to whisk it in off the heat, a piece at a time, and not to let the sauce boil afterward or it separates.
- Sourcing and yield"Gold-coated pike" probably indicates a fish in prime condition with bright bronze flanks, though the text does not explain the term. Pike is rarely sold commercially in the US; walleye, zander or a firm-fleshed pickerel will substitute. Neither recipe gives quantities served, and the baked version specifies no weight of fish, so any yield is an estimate.
Pike was a prestige freshwater fish in nineteenth-century European kitchens, prized for firm white flesh that held up to poaching whole and dressing on a napkin, and Oscar Tschirky's book reflects the Waldorf's debt to that continental repertoire. The second recipe is credited to Urbain Dubois, the French chef whose La Cuisine Classique and École des Cuisinières were standard references for grand-hotel cooking, and who is usually credited with helping to popularize service à la russe, the coursed dinner Oscar's dining room ran on. The sour-cream treatment in the first recipe points the other direction, toward Central and Eastern Europe, where pike baked in soured cream with onion and bay is long-established household cooking; the Parmesan gratin finish is the hotel kitchen's addition. Soy sauce appearing as a quiet seasoning in a thickened fish liquor was unremarkable by 1896, when bottled "soy" had been a European store-cupboard staple for well over a century.