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To Boil Pike

A boiled pike stuffed with oysters, breadcrumbs, and seasonings, then garnished with lemon and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

To Boil Pike

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Remove the gills from the pike and wash it thoroughly.

  2. Chop the oysters and mix them with the bread crumbs, butter, egg yolks, summer savory, grated lemon peel, salt, and black pepper.

  3. Stuff the pike with the mixture and sew it up.

Poach and serve

  1. Wrap the pike in a cloth and place it in a fish kettle of boiling water.

  2. Add vinegar and coarse sea salt to the water.

  3. Boil for 30 minutes if medium-sized, or 1 hour if large.

  4. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley sprigs before serving with egg 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. Summer savory + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Summer savory + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pike
Forms the main body of the dish, holding the stuffing while it cooks in the water.
Oysters
Add briny, savoury flavour and moisture to the stuffing as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the stuffing a soft, cohesive body.
Eggs
Bind the stuffing together so it holds its shape when sliced.

The step that matters

Sewing up and wrapping the pike. If the stuffed fish is not sewn closed tightly and wrapped in cloth, the stuffing can escape or loosen during boiling, and the fish may cook unevenly.

Swap the summer savory

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, bread, butter, pepper, egg, lemon, vinegar):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Summer savorythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, bread, butter, pepper, egg, lemon, vinegar. 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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