Skip to main content
Main

Pike, Baked

A whole pike stuffed with forcemeat, coated in egg and breadcrumbs, baked with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pike, Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the fish

  1. Scale the pike and remove the gills. Wash and dry it thoroughly.

  2. Stuff the pike with forcemeat and sew it up. Fasten the tail in the mouth with a skewer.

Coat and bake

  1. Brush the pike with egg and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Baste with butter.

  2. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  3. Bake until the pike is a nice brown color, covering it with buttered paper to prevent drying.

  4. For variety, mix chopped parsley with the bread crumbs for one pike.

Serve

  1. Serve with anchovy or Dutch sauce and plain melted 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Pike
The main fish, whose firm flesh holds its shape and bakes into flakes during cooking.
Egg
Brushed on the surface, it helps the bread crumbs adhere and encourages browning.
Butter
Basted over the fish, it adds richness and moisture and helps the crust brown.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp coating on the outside that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until the pike is a nice brown color, covering it with buttered paper to prevent drying.. Fish is lean and dries out quickly in dry oven heat. The buttered paper shields the surface from drying while the interior cooks through, and the color signals a properly browned crust.

“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.

More baked pike recipes

Sauce 3 See all 78 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes