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Pickerel, Caper Sauce
Trim off the fins and neatly wipe a very fresh pickerel of three pounds. Place in a saucepan with a quart water, a half gill vinegar, a teaspoon salt and two branches parsley. Cover pan and slowly boil twenty minutes. Take up fish, place on a hot dish, pour a caper sauce over the fish and serve.
A plain court-bouillon poach, of the kind that fills the fish chapters of pre-war international cookbooks. Two things need attention: the cooking temperature and the sauce the recipe assumes you already have.
- Do not actually boil it"Slowly boil" was the standard phrase for what we would now call a bare simmer or a poach. Held at a true rolling boil the flesh of a lean freshwater fish tightens, the skin splits and the fillets shred when lifted. Keep the liquid at 170-180F, with barely a tremor at the surface.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes may be long -- measured from the moment the liquid comes up to temperature, a whole fish of this size will often be done sooner than twenty minutes, though a cold start adds time. Test at the backbone behind the head: the flesh should just release from the bone. Note that 145F is the recommended safe internal temperature for fish.
- Half a gillBy the American gill of 4 fluid ounces, half a gill is 1/4 cup, 2 fluid ounces; by the imperial gill of 5 fluid ounces it is 2 1/2. With a quart of water either gives a mild acidulated poaching liquid; white wine vinegar or cider vinegar both work, malt vinegar is assertive enough to be noticed.
- The liquid should barely coverA quart will not submerge a whole 3 lb fish in a wide pan. Use a deep, narrow pan or a fish kettle, or scale the liquid up in the same proportions so the fish is just covered. Cold start, then bring it slowly up to temperature so the skin does not tear.
- PickerelThe name is used loosely: in the United States it properly means one of the small pickerels of the pike family, in Canadian and Great Lakes usage it is often applied to walleye, and in British books it can mean a young pike proper. Any firm, lean, white freshwater fish takes this treatment, and cod or haddock stand in perfectly well.
- The caper sauce is elsewhereThe recipe assumes the book's own caper sauce, which in this period means melted butter or a plain white sauce thinned with a little of the fish liquor, finished with drained capers and a squeeze of lemon. Rinse brined capers so the sauce is seasoned by you rather than by the jar.
- Bones and handlingPike and walleye are bony, and a poached whole fish falls apart on transfer. Wrap it in a double thickness of cheesecloth with the ends left long, or set it on a rack, so it can be lifted out flat.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish gives perhaps a pound or so of cooked flesh: three or four servings as a main course, with the parsley from the poaching liquid discarded rather than served.
Poaching a whole fish in salted water sharpened with vinegar is one of the oldest procedures in European cookery, older than the word court-bouillon that came to describe it; the acid firms the flesh, keeps it white, and takes the edge off the muddy note that freshwater fish can carry. Caper sauce was the near-automatic partner for boiled fish and boiled mutton alike in nineteenth-century Anglo-American kitchens, capers being one of the few sharp, salty, shelf-stable seasonings a household could keep indefinitely in a jar. Its appearance here under "The World's Kitchen" says something about how such collections worked: pickerel is a familiar North American market fish, but the method and the sauce are lifted straight from the French repertoire, and the two are joined without comment. Cookbooks of this era also insisted repeatedly on a "very fresh" fish for good reason, since with inland fish freshness was the whole of the quality.