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Potted Pike

Potted Pike is a fish cooked in butter with mace, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, coarse sea salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Potted Pike

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale the pike, then cut off the head, tail, and fins.

  2. Open the belly and clean it thoroughly.

  3. Mix the butter with mace, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, coarse sea salt, and white pepper. Rub the inside of the fish with the butter mixture.

  4. Tie the fish with kitchen twine.

Bake and debone

  1. Bake the fish in a generous amount of butter until cooked through.

  2. Once cooled, carefully remove all the bones.

Pot and seal

  1. Beat the fish meat in a mortar with the cold butter (not the gravy).

  2. Fill pots with the mixture.

  3. Cover the pots with clarified butter.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Nutmeg + white peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pike
Provides the lean, flaky fish meat that forms the body of the potted dish.
Unsalted butter
Adds richness and moisture, and binds the beaten fish into a spreadable mixture.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour that complements the fish.
Mace
Adds a delicate, aromatic spice flavour that complements the fish.

The step that matters

Remove all the bones after cooling. Pike has many fine intramuscular bones that are hard to see once the fish is cooked. Removing them while the flesh is cool and firm keeps the bones from being missed, since warm flesh is softer and tears more easily.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mace, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mace, pepper, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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