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To Boil Pike

A boiled pike stuffed with forcemeat, served with melted butter, lemon, and sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and oyster work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 496 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Boil Pike

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the cleaned pike in a mixture of 1 cup vinegar and enough water to cover it for 30 minutes to remove any muddy taste.

  2. Dry the inside of the fish and fill it with oyster forcemeat or veal forcemeat.

  3. Curl the fish and fasten it with the tail in the mouth.

Boil

  1. Place the fish in a pot and cover it with cold water.

  2. Add coarse sea salt as soon as the water boils and skim the surface.

  3. Boil the fish gently for 30 minutes to 1 hour, depending on its size.

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter, sauce-cruets, and lemon, or with your choice of 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. Fish + oystertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
Firm white flesh that holds its shape through gentle boiling and becomes flaky when cooked.
Vinegar
Its mild acidity helps draw out muddy-tasting compounds during the initial soak.
Forcemeat
Fills the cavity with a seasoned stuffing that adds moisture and richness to the lean fish.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat to the mild, lean fish at the table.

The step that matters

Boiling gently. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard rolling boil cooks the fish evenly and keeps the delicate flesh from breaking apart.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, fish, oyster, butter, sauce):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, fish, oyster, butter, sauce. 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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