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Pickerel, Horseradish Sauce
Trim off the fins, cut off the head and neatly wipe a three-pound very fresh pickerel. Split in two through the back, remove the spinal bone, place fish in a sautoire pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Moisten with a half gill white wine, a gill water, adding half an ounce butter. Cover with a lightly buttered paper, boil for five minutes on the range, then bake in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove and keep hot. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a small saucepan, add two level tablespoons flour; stir briskly while heating for half minute, then pour in one gill hot milk and three-quarters gill of the fish liquor; season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon pepper, mix until it comes to a boil, then add two tablespoons freshly grated horseradish; lightly mix. Dress the fish on a hot dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A straightforward braise-and-bake with a horseradish velouté built on the cooking liquor. The measurements are in gills and saltspoons, and no oven temperature is given.
- The hinge: horseradish goes in off the heatThe hinge: horseradish goes in last -- The sauce is brought to a boil before the horseradish is stirred in, and the recipe asks only that it be "lightly mixed" at that stage; it does not say to remove the pan from the heat. Heat drives off the volatile oils that give fresh horseradish its bite, so prolonged cooking after the root goes in will flatten the sauce.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz; half a gill is 1/4 cup, and three-quarters of a gill is 6 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the sauce takes 1/4 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. A moderate oven, somewhere around 350-375F, is a reasonable modern reading for twenty minutes on a split 3-lb fish under paper. The fish is done when the flesh at the thickest part turns opaque and parts from the bone.
- What pickerel means hereIn American markets of the period the name covered chain pickerel and small northern pike, and around the Great Lakes it was sometimes used for walleye as well. Any firm freshwater fish of about 3 lb works: walleye, pike, or a whole lake trout. True pike carry a row of Y-bones along the upper fillet that survive splitting and boning through the back.
- Sautoire and buttered paperA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan. The buttered paper is a cartouche: cut a round of parchment to fit inside the rim, butter one side, and lay it directly on the fish, which keeps the surface moist without sealing the pan the way a lid would.
- Fresh horseradishTwo tablespoons of freshly grated root, not the jarred prepared kind, which is cut with vinegar and will thin and sour the sauce. Grate it shortly before use; cut horseradish darkens and loses pungency on standing.
- The liquorA quarter cup of wine and half a cup of water reduce very little under paper. Strain the pan liquid before measuring the 6 tablespoons into the roux, and taste before adding the sauce's own salt, since the fish was seasoned with a full teaspoon.
- YieldA 3-lb whole fish, headed and boned, serves three to four. Boiled or steamed potatoes suit it and soak up the sauce well.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book (1906) as a survey of national dishes for American households, which is why a modest freshwater fish preparation sits among dishes drawn from all over the world. Horseradish with boiled or braised river fish is Central and Northern European in character, close to the Austrian and German Krensauce and to the horseradish served with carp across Poland and the Jewish kitchen, and it travelled to America with those cooks. Pickerel was a cheap and abundant catch in the Northeast and the Great Lakes at the time, bony and firm and well matched to a sharp sauce; the name itself is a diminutive of pike, and it was applied loosely enough in the fish trade that a nineteenth-century "pickerel" might have been any of several species.