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Baked Pike

A whole pike is stuffed with a breadcrumb mixture and baked, then served with a sauce of anchovy butter, cayenne, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Pike

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Prepare a marinade and soak the bread crumbs in boiling broth until soft.

  2. Add eggs, pepper, salt, suet, lemon peel, and anchovies to the soaked bread and mix well.

Bake the pike

  1. Stuff the pike with the mixture and place it in the marinade.

  2. Cover the pike with buttered paper and bake at 350°F (175°C) until cooked through.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Make a roux and dilute it with the marinade to create a sauce.

  2. Finish the sauce with anchovy butter, cayenne, and lemon juice.

  3. Carefully skin the pike, leaving the head intact, and mask it with the sauce.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Lobster + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Bread + oystertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the bread and suet into a mixture that holds together when cooked.
Bread crumbs
Soak up broth to form a moist, soft body for the stuffing.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and rich as it cooks.
Anchovies
Contribute a savory, salty depth to the stuffing and sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finishing sauce.

The step that matters

Bake at 350°F until cooked through. Fish is cooked when its flesh turns opaque and flakes easily; overbaking dries the flesh, while underbaking leaves the stuffing and thick fish unsafe and raw inside.

“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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