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Pickerel, Nicoise
Remove head and fins from a three-pound fresh pickerel, split in two through back, remove spinal bone, wipe well and place in a baking dish. Peel and finely chop two sound red tomatoes, remove the stones and finely slice twelve large olives and add both to the fish. Moisten with half gill white wine and squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon. Mix on a plate half ounce of butter, half teaspoon anchovy butter, half teaspoon anchovy essence, half teaspoon chopped parsley and a teaspoon flour. Divide this in small bits over the fish. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover fish with buttered paper and set in oven forty-five minutes. Remove, lift up paper and serve in same dish.
A plain baked fish with tomato, olive and anchovy — the method is sound, but the book assumes a coal range and gives no temperature. Two things need attention: the timing and the small compound butter.
- The timing is the hingeForty-five minutes will dry out a split three-pound fish. Bake at 375F and check at 20 to 25 minutes; the flesh should flake at the thickest point and read about 135F. Carryover heat under the paper finishes it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the original cook judged by feel and the book supplies no oven term for this dish. 375F suits a shallow dish of fish and wine and keeps the liquid from stewing.
- PickerelIn American usage of the period this generally means a small pike, and in Great Lakes and Canadian usage it can mean walleye. Walleye, pike, or any firm freshwater fish works; sea bass or snapper is a fair substitute. Pike carry fine Y-bones along the flanks — run your fingers over the fillet after removing the spine.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is four tablespoons of white wine. Three saltspoons of pepper is about three-quarters of a teaspoon, a saltspoon being a quarter teaspoon.
- Anchovy butter and anchovy essenceBoth were standard store-cupboard or kitchen-made anchovy preparations of the period and both are now scarce. Half a teaspoon of each can be replaced by one mashed oil-packed anchovy fillet plus a few drops of fish sauce, or by a teaspoon of good anchovy paste.
- The butter-flour mixtureThis is a small beurre mani":it thickens the tomato, wine and lemon into a light sauce as it melts. Dot it in genuinely small pieces or you will get pale flour spots in the finished dish.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment cut to the size of the dish, pressed lightly onto the fish. It steams as much as it bakes, which is why the fish is served in the same dish with its juices.
- OlivesTwelve large olives means brine-cured green or black olives with stones in, not canned pitted ones. Kalamata or a similar large brine-cured olive gives the right salt and bitterness.
- YieldA three-pound whole fish serves three, perhaps four with bread and potatoes.
"Niçoise" on a menu of this period points to the Provençal coast around Nice, and it functioned as a garnish name in professional French kitchens rather than a claim of local authenticity — Escoffier, whose codification was published in 1903, and his contemporaries applied it to eggs, chicken and fish alike. As codified it commonly involved tomatoes with garlic, French beans and potatoes as well. What makes this version interesting is the substrate: a freshwater pickerel from an American lake dressed in the vocabulary of the Mediterranean, with British bottled anchovy essence standing in for the salted anchovies of Nice. That transposition is the whole point of a book called The International Cook Book.