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Pike Financiere
Clean and skin a pike, wrap it in buttered paper and boil in mirepoix and French wine mixed in equal quantities. Make a garnishing of pike forcemeat quenelles, mushrooms, crayfish tails and truffles mixed in financiere sauce, prepared as for fish. Put a rice socle on a hot dish, drain and glaze the pike and put it in the socle, pile the garnishing round it in such a way that it hides the socle, garnish round with truffles, mushrooms and crayfish. Trim four silver skewers with crayfish, mushrooms and fried smelts, stick them in the fish and serve with a sauceboatful of the same sauce.
This is a full-dress banquet presentation from the Waldorf's turn-of-the-century kitchen, written for cooks who already knew the component preparations by heart. The whole dish stands or falls on the fish, so treat the elaborate garnish as optional and the poaching as the part that matters.
- Do not actually boil it"Boil" here means poach at a bare tremble, around 170-180F. A whole 3-4 lb pike needs roughly 8-10 minutes per inch of thickness at the thickest point; a rolling boil will shred the flakes.
- Buttered paperParchment, generously buttered, wrapped and tied so the fish holds its shape. Modern parchment stands in for the buttered paper of the period.
- Mirepoix and wineMirepoix here appears to mean an aromatic cooking liquid rather than a dry dice: carrot, onion, celery, a bay leaf and thyme sweated in butter, moistened with stock. Equal parts of that and wine -- the recipe specifies only "French wine" -- with enough liquid to cook the fish in.
- Financiere sauceA Madeira-based brown sauce with truffle essence, made "as for fish" means built on a reduced fish stock rather than veal. If you are not making demi-glace from scratch, a well-reduced fish fumet thickened lightly and finished with Madeira and butter gives the same effect.
- QuenellesPike forcemeat quenelles are raw pike pounded with panade, egg white and cream, then poached in spoon-shaped dumplings. Pike is the classic choice because its lean, firm flesh binds and sets well; keep everything ice-cold or the mixture breaks.
- CrayfishLive crayfish would have been the likely source in 1900. Cooked frozen crayfish tails work for the garnish; whole cooked crayfish for the decorative border. Check local rules, as some jurisdictions restrict transport of live crayfish.
- The socle and skewersA socle is a molded pedestal, here of stiff cooked rice, that lifts the fish above the platter. It is architecture, not eating. The silver skewers, correctly hatelets, were largely decorative -- though here they carry crayfish, mushrooms and fried smelts -- and are the part most safely dropped.
- SmeltsWhole small smelts, floured and deep-fried until crisp, eaten bones and all. Sold frozen in most fish markets; they need about two minutes at 375F.
- YieldThe recipe does not specify a size; a whole pike of 3-4 lb with this weight of garnish would serve roughly six to eight as a main course.
Financiere is one of the nineteenth-century French garnishes traditionally said to be named for the class of people expected to afford it: cockscombs and kidneys, quenelles, mushrooms, truffles and olives bound in a Madeira sauce, codified in the Escoffier-era repertoire as a grand garnish for sweetbreads, poultry and, adapted as here with a fish-stock base, for whole fish. Oscar Tschirky was not a cook by trade but the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, and his 1896 book reads as a record of what the hotel's French brigade produced rather than a set of domestic instructions, which is why steps like "pike forcemeat quenelles" and "financiere sauce" are named rather than explained. Pike suited the treatment for a practical reason: its flesh is lean, firm and gelatinous enough to hold a poached shape and take a glaze, though its notorious fine bones are also why so much of it went into pounded forcemeat. The socle, the skewers and the garnish piled to hide its own pedestal belong to a service style built for the dining room, where a platter was carried whole to the table before being broken down at a sideboard.