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Boiled Pike with Caper Sauce
A pike will improve by being kept for two days; clean it, cut off the fins and bind its head round with a string. Put the fish in a fishkettle, cover with court bouillon, and let it simmer for forty minutes, then leave it to soak in the court bouillon for twenty-four hours. Before warming the pike again take it and the liquor out and clean the kettle, then put it back again and warm it for twenty minutes. Place the fish on a folded napkin or ornamental dish-paper on a hot dish, garnish round with fried parsley and serve with a sauceboatful of caper sauce.
A large European-style whole-fish preparation, written for a household with a cool larder and a proper fish kettle. Two instructions — the two-day hanging and the twenty-four-hour soak — need rethinking before anything else.
- The 24-hour soak must be refrigeratedCooked fish left standing in warm court bouillon overnight is an ideal medium for bacterial growth, and the original assumes a cold stone larder that most kitchens no longer have. Cool the kettle quickly and hold it below 40F, and do not attempt the two-day pre-ageing of an uncleaned fish at all; buy the pike gutted and cook it within a day.
- Court bouillonWater with white wine or vinegar, sliced onion and carrot, parsley stalks, bay, peppercorns and salt, simmered twenty minutes before the fish goes in. It should be cold or barely warm when the fish is added so the skin does not split.
- Forty minutes is far too longForty minutes is long for a modern fish -- the figure presumably assumes a considerably larger pike than most cooks buy today, and a very gentle simmer. A 3-4 lb fish is done in 20-25 minutes at a bare shiver, 170-180F, or when the flesh at the backbone reaches 145F. The second twenty-minute warming compounds the problem; five to ten minutes is enough to take the chill off.
- The fish kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lifting rack. Without one, use a deep roasting pan on two burners and lift the fish on a doubled sling of cheesecloth, or curl it in a wide Dutch oven. The point of the rack is that a poached pike will not survive being handled with a spatula.
- Binding the headWrapping string round the head and gill covers keeps them from gaping open and the head from separating during the long soak. Purely cosmetic, but the dish is a presentation piece.
- Caper sauceClassically either a butter sauce or a veloute made with some of the strained cooking liquor, finished with drained capers and a little of their vinegar; the recipe does not say which. Add the capers off the heat so they keep their bite.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into fat around 350F for a few seconds until crisp and still green. They spit violently if the parsley is wet.
- BonesPike carries a row of forked intramuscular Y-bones along the upper fillet that no amount of poaching softens. Serve it carved at the table by someone willing to deal with them, and warn diners.
- YieldA 3-4 lb pike serves four to six as a main course; the long cooking time suggests a considerably larger fish than that.
Pike was a prestige freshwater fish in European cookery long before it reached American hotel menus — lean, firm and large enough to serve whole, which is why it turns up so often boiled and presented on a folded napkin rather than filleted. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, draws heavily on the classical French repertoire as it was cooked in a big New York hotel kitchen: a whole fish poached in court bouillon and sent out with a sharp sauce to cut the blandness. The instruction to let the fish rest a full day in its liquor suggests a kitchen that cooked ahead and could rely on a cold cellar. Capers, imported pickled from the Mediterranean, were a standard foil for boiled white fish and boiled mutton alike in the nineteenth century — the vinegar did the work that lemon does on a modern plate.