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Fried Pike
Select small pike, draw and wash them; put a lump of butter in a stewpan and when blue smoke arises put in the fish, seeing that they are perfectly dry, and fry till nicely browned and crisp. Afterward drain the butter off them and put in with them two or three anchovies, a slice of ginger, a little grated nutmeg, salt to taste, and a sufficient quantity of claret to cover them. Boil the fish until tender, when the liquor should be reduced to half its original quantity; then add the juice of an orange and a small lump of butter. Lay the fish on a hot dish, pour the sauce over, garnish with slices of oranges, and serve.
A very old-fashioned treatment: the fish is browned in butter, then braised in red wine with spice and anchovy and finished with orange. The method is sound, but several of the instructions read differently now than they did in 1896.
- "Draw and wash"Means gut the fish and remove the gills; pike also need scaling, and the slime coat should be rinsed off under cold water. Dry the skin thoroughly on a towel or it will steam rather than crisp.
- Blue smoke and butterWhole butter starts to burn well before it smokes blue. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and hold the pan at a brisk medium-high. Add the finishing lump of butter off the heat so it emulsifies into the sauce instead of splitting.
- AnchoviesMost likely salt-cured or bottled fillets, a common savory seasoning of the period, rather than a canned dressing. Two or three oil-packed fillets, mashed, dissolve into the wine and read as depth rather than as fish.
- ClaretThe British trade name for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works; about 2 cups covers two or three small fish in a shallow pan. Avoid anything oaky or sweet, since the liquid reduces by half and concentrates.
- Ginger and nutmegA slice of ginger root, roughly the thickness of a coin; the book does not say whether fresh or dried. Grate the nutmeg at the last moment; pre-ground has little of the resinous quality this sauce depends on.
- "Boil until tender"The hinge of the dish. Pike is often judged done around 135F and goes cottony past that, though current food-safety guidance for fish is 145F; bring the wine to a bare simmer and hold it there for 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness. Lift the fish out and reduce the liquor hard on its own rather than boiling the fish while it reduces.
- The orangeOranges used in cooking in this period were often tarter than a modern navel. Use the juice of half a navel orange plus a squeeze of lemon, or the juice of a whole Seville or blood orange if you can get one.
- Fish and bonesPike carry a row of forked intramuscular bones that no amount of cooking dissolves; warn people at the table, or substitute walleye, perch, or a small striped bass. Figure one small fish per person.
Fish browned in fat, then stewed in wine with warm spice and finished with a sour fruit juice, is a formula much older than the Waldorf: it descends from medieval and Renaissance European cookery, where verjuice, bitter orange, or vinegar did the work that lemon and tomato do now, and where ginger and nutmeg were commonly used with freshwater fish rather than reserved for sweets. Pike itself was a prestige fish in Europe for centuries and much less prized in American markets, where its bones told against it. Its presence here, alongside the anchovy and the claret, is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen in the 1890s was a European kitchen operating in New York, and that a hotel of that rank was still cooking dishes whose spicing would have been recognizable long before.