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Pickerel, Creole
Cut head off and neatly trim a fresh pickerel of about three pounds, split in two and remove spinal bone. Lay fish on a lightly buttered tin, season with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper, divide half ounce butter in little bits over surface, squeeze over juice of half a sound lemon, set in oven fifteen minutes, remove and transfer fish to a baking dish. Pour a Creole sauce and sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese over fish, set in oven for fifteen minutes more, remove, cut half a lemon in thin slices, arrange around fish and serve.
A straightforward two-stage bake: the fish is set with butter and lemon, then finished under a tomato sauce and cheese. The original assumes you already have the Creole sauce made, which is the part that needs planning.
- Make the sauce firstThe recipe gives no sauce method and presumably relies on a Creole sauce recipe elsewhere in the book. Whatever version you use, it must be finished and hot before the fish goes in the oven, since the second bake is only fifteen minutes and will not cook down a thin sauce.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Treat it as a hot oven, around 400F, for both stages; the first bake is meant to set the flesh, not cook it through.
- What pickerel meansLoosely a small pike; in Canadian and Great Lakes usage the name is also commonly applied to walleye. A whole 3 lb specimen is a fish-market order rather than a supermarket one. Two 1 1/2 lb whole trout, or 1 1/2 to 2 lb of thick walleye, pike, perch or cod fillet, behave much the same under sauce.
- Total time is generousThirty minutes at 400F will overcook a split 3 lb fish, which needs roughly 20 to 25 minutes in total. Cut the first stage to about eight minutes and pull the dish when the thickest part flakes and reads 130 to 135F.
- "A lightly buttered tin"A shallow metal baking sheet or roasting tin. The transfer to a second dish for saucing is worth keeping: it leaves the watery first-stage juices behind rather than thinning the Creole sauce.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper on a 3 lb fish is about right, but the Creole sauce and the cheese both bring salt of their own, so season the sauce lightly.
- Cheese quantityOne tablespoon of grated Parmesan over a whole fish is a seasoning, not a gratin topping. Resist increasing it; the point is a savoury film on the tomato, not a crust.
- YieldA 3 lb whole fish serves three to four as a main course.
Pickerel was a common freshwater catch across the northern United States and Canada, cheap enough to be everyday food and firm enough to hold together when split and baked. Dressing it "Creole" means finishing it with the tomato, onion and sweet pepper sauce associated with New Orleans cooking, a formula that spread through hotel and restaurant kitchens as shorthand for anything served in that sauce, from eggs to veal. The grated Parmesan or Swiss over the top is not Louisiana practice but one of the ways a saucy dish could be given a finished surface with a quick pass in the oven. The lemon slices ringing the platter belong to the same tradition of formal garnish for fish.