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Pickerel Saute, Piquante Sauce
Thoroughly wipe a three-pound fresh pickerel, place in oval saucepan with a sliced carrot, sliced onion, two branches parsley, a sprig thyme, sprig marjoram, bay leaf, clove, teaspoon whole black pepper and a gill vinegar. Cover fish with water, season with a light tablespoon salt, cover pan and boil slowly for forty minutes. With skimmer lift up fish without breaking, drain on a cloth, then dress on a hot dish, pour Piquante sauce over and serve.
Despite the title, nothing here is sautéed: this is a whole fish poached in a vinegar court bouillon and sauced. Read "boil slowly" as a bare shiver of the surface, and treat the timing with suspicion.
- Cut the time nearly in halfForty minutes will reduce a three-pound pickerel to cotton wool. A whole fish that size poaches in roughly 20-25 minutes at a bare simmer, or until the thickest part behind the head reads about 140-145F and the flesh parts cleanly from the backbone. Start checking at 18 minutes.
- "Boil slowly" means do not boilA rolling boil tears the skin, clouds the liquid and makes lifting the fish out in one piece impossible. Bring the pan just to the boil, then drop it to the faintest tremble for the whole cooking time.
- A gill of vinegarHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Cider or white wine vinegar suits better than harsh distilled vinegar. Its job is as much to firm the flesh and keep it white as to flavour it.
- The oval saucepanA fish kettle, long enough to hold the fish straight. Failing that, a roasting pan on two burners works; so does curving the fish inside a wide Dutch oven. Bringing the fish up on a rack or a doubled sling of cheesecloth solves the lifting problem the recipe glosses over.
- What a pickerel isIn American usage of this period the name was applied loosely: to small pike, to the chain pickerel, and in some regions to walleye. The same treatment suits any firm freshwater fish of about three pounds. Pike and true pickerel carry fine Y-bones along the upper fillet (walleye, a perch, does not), and fish of this kind were commonly served whole on the bone.
- Piquante sauceNot supplied on this page; the book presumably carries it elsewhere. Sauce piquante is a brown sauce finished with shallots reduced in vinegar, with chopped gherkins and often capers and herbs stirred in off the heat. Make it while the fish poaches and keep it warm; pickerel is lean, and the sharpness works as contrast rather than as a cut through richness.
- The poaching liquidSeason it properly at the start, since the fish takes up salt from the bath, not afterwards. A light tablespoon of salt to the several quarts needed to cover is modest; taste the liquid and aim for something like mild seawater.
- YieldA three-pound whole fish serves four generously as a main course, allowing for head, skin and frame.
Poaching a whole fish in an acidulated vegetable broth and dressing it with a sharp brown sauce is straight classical French practice, transplanted into an American book. The court bouillon of carrot, onion, herbs, peppercorns and vinegar was the standard bath for freshwater fish in the professional repertoire, and sauce piquante - brown sauce sharpened with a shallot-and-vinegar reduction and studded with gherkins - was one of the small sauces regularly paired with plain-cooked fish and boiled meats. Pickerel appears rather than sole or turbot because this was a book written for American kitchens, where pike and walleye came out of the lakes and rivers cheaply and in quantity.