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Pickled Pike
Scale and empty a pike, wash it thoroughly, bind its head up, put it in a fish kettle and cover with a fish stock, made with red wine; add two or three bay leaves and boil slowly till tender. Leave the pike in the sauce till the following day. When ready to serve drain the fish, put it on a folded napkin or ornamental dish-paper, garnish with fresh parsley and serve with oil and vinegar.
A cold whole fish set in a red-wine court-bouillon and held a day — the "pickling" is the wine and its acidity, not a vinegar cure. The instructions are terse in the way Waldorf kitchen notes always are, so most of the work is filling in quantities and temperatures.
- The hinge: cook it barely below a simmer"Boil slowly" is best read as water trembling rather than rolling, somewhere in the region of 175-180F, since a hard boil tears the skin and shreds the flesh off a whole fish. Figure roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the shoulder, and longer at the low end of that heat, until a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance.
- Fish kettleA long lidded pan with a perforated lift-out rack; the rack is what lets you move a cooked whole fish without breaking it. A deep roasting pan on the stovetop works if the fish is cradled in cheesecloth with the ends left long as handles.
- Fish stock made with red wineNo proportions are given. A workable court-bouillon is equal parts fish stock and dry red wine, enough to submerge the fish — how much that takes depends entirely on the shape of the kettle — with the bay leaves, a sliced onion and a few peppercorns. Red wine will tint the skin a dull violet, which is expected.
- Binding the headA turn or two of kitchen twine around the head and jaw keeps it from gaping open and the gill plates from splaying as the fish cooks. Purely a matter of presentation.
- Pike, and what to use insteadNorthern pike is largely a sport fish now and rarely sold; walleye, pickerel, striped bass or a whole trout of 2-3 lb all behave the same way. Pike carries rows of forked Y-bones along the flanks that cannot be pulled like pin bones, so plan to serve it off the bone at the table.
- Leaving it in the sauce overnightCool the pan quickly and refrigerate it, fish and liquid together, rather than leaving it out as the original assumes. A day in the cold liquid is what seasons the flesh through and firms it.
- ServingIt goes out cold, drained, on a napkin or paper that absorbs the drips — a Victorian dining-room convention. "Oil and vinegar" means a plain vinaigrette passed separately, about three parts olive oil to one of wine vinegar with salt and pepper.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves four as a main course, six to eight as a cold first course on a buffet.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf kitchen at the turn of the century, when the cold whole fish was a fixture of the buffet and the summer luncheon table — cooked the day before, held in its own liquor, and dressed only at the moment of service. Cooking fish in red wine rather than white is often said to be the older French practice, seen in the freshwater matelotes of the Loire and Burgundy, though the form survives in red-wine and cider or white-wine versions alike, and it suits pike, a bony, lean, assertive river fish that European cooks had prized for centuries and that American hotel kitchens may well have sourced from the Great Lakes trade. "Pickled" is used loosely here in the older sense of something steeped in an acidulated liquid to keep it, a step short of the true vinegar pickles and escabeche preparations built on the same logic. The folded napkin under the fish and the ornamental dish-paper are pure period detail: the platter had to look dry, and the plumbing of a cold fish being what it is, something had to absorb the liquid it kept giving up.