James Beard's New Fish Cookery - James Beard [111]
2. Poach pike in simmering salted water with the addition of plenty of fresh dill, parsley, and an onion stuck with 2 cloves. When the fish is cooked, remove it to a hot platter. Make a sauce velouté (page 21) with some of the broth, season it with chopped fresh dill, parsley, and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. Pour the sauce over the fish.
COLD PIKE WITH VARIOUS SAUCES
Cold pike is one of the most delicate and flavorful of the white fish. A delightful supper dish in summer is a whole cold pike garnished with cucumbers, tomatoes, salade Russe, stuffed eggs flavored with anchovy and sardines, and olives.
To prepare the fish, poach it in a court bouillon (page 18) according to the Canadian cooking theory (page 12). Chill it, and when cool skin it, leaving the head and tail intact. You may make an aspic of the broth, if you wish, and mask the fish with it. Or simply place the cold poached pike on a platter of greens and garnish to suit your own taste. Serve it with a well-flavored olive oil mayonnaise (page 34), sauce verte (page 34), or sauce rémoulade (page 35).
If you wish to be really elaborate, you may make an aspic of the court bouillon (pages 18–19). Combine some of the aspic with mayonnaise (page 34) and cover the fish with this. Chill until set, then mask with aspic and chill again. Decorate with truffles, pickled mushrooms, capers — anything you like. For suggestions for decorating fish in aspic, see page 131.
IZAAK WALTON’S RECIPE FOR ROASTING A PIKE from THE COMPLEAT ANGLER
Mr. Walton’s comment on this recipe for roasting pike is ample proof that he enjoyed the cooked results of his angling as much as the angling itself. He wrote: “This dish of meat is too good for any but anglers, or very honest men; and I trust you will prove both, and therefore I have trusted you with this secret.”
Here is the recipe:
“First, open your pike at the gills, and if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly; out of these take his guts and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small with thyme, sweet marjoram, and a little winter-savory; to these put some pickled oysters, and some anchovies, two or three, both these last whole (for the anchovies will melt, and the oysters should not); to these you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs which are shred, and let them all be well salted (if the pike be more than a yard long, then you may put into these herbs more than a pound, or if he be less, then less butter will suffice): these being thus mixed with a blade or two of mace, must be put into the pike’s belly, and then his belly so sewed up as to keep all the butter in his belly, if it be possible, if not, then as much of it as you possibly can; but take not off the scales: then you are to thrust the spit through his mouth out at his tail; and then take four, or five, or six split sticks or very thin laths, and a convenient quantity of tape or filleting: these laths are to be tied round about the pike’s body from his head to his tail, and the tape tied somewhat thick to prevent his breaking or falling off from the spit: let him be roasted very leisurely, and often basted with claret wine and anchovies and butter mixed together, and also with what moisture falls from him into the pan: when you have roasted him sufficiently, you are to hold under him (when you unwind or cut the tape that ties him) such a dish as you purpose to eat him out of; and let him fall into it with the sauce that is roasted in his belly; and by this means the pike will be kept unbroken and complete: then, to the sauce which was within, and also that sauce in the pan, you are to add a fit quantity of the best butter, and to squeeze the juice of three or four oranges: last!, you may either put into the pike with the oysters two cloves of garlick, and take it out whole, when the pike is cut off the spit; or to give the sauce a haut-gout let the dish (into which you let the pike fall) be rubbed with it: the using or