shelidonDecember 16, 2023Leave a Comment

Ingredients (serves 4 people):

• one small pike (around 1 kg);
• a handful of coarse salt;
•  a quarter of liter of water;
• 1 liter of blonde ale;
• a spoonful of ground ginger;
• a teaspoon of cinnamon;
• rosemary;
• marjoram;
• thyme;
• parsley;
• summer savory;
• a curl of butter.

Recipe:

Behead the pike, rub its body with ground salt until it stops sweating and then gut it. Remove the entrails, and throw the good ones (the ones without biles, juices or other unpleasant stuff) into a quarter of liter of water with the ale and a pinch of salt: you’re going to boil everything until it shrinks down to something you can use for garnish when the pike is baked.
Meanwhile, mix the finger and cinnamon, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, parsley and savoury, and stuff them into the guts of the pike.
Place the fish inside a pan with a curl of butter on top, and bake it until it’s cooked. Slice it and serve it with the ale-based fish stock.

Original Recipe

‘For to seth a pyke. Kill him in the head. Stick and take a handful of great salt. Rub him till the flewme go from him. Open him at the belly and take out the refete, and take out the gall and strip all the small guts and cast them away and save the great gut. Take a fair clean pan and a quart of fair water. Take a quart of new ale and a dish full of este and take 2 handfuls of salt and cast therein. Take a little ginger and cinnamon and cast thereto rosemary, marjoram, thyme and parsley and a little savory, and break all these herbs in two. Cast in the pan. If he be not well refete, cast in a little suet butter but seethe it.’

Savoury

The etymology of the genus name for this herb, Satureja or santoreggia in Italian, is uncertain. Linnaeus derived the name from an ancient Roman word whose Latin root satura means satiated: this was a reference to the digestive properties of the plants in this genus, actual or supposed. Another etymology would derive the name from sauce to indicate the aromatic properties of this plant in cooking. The English word refers to a Latin name for the “savoury herbs”, and some scholars believe it was Satureja that Virgil recommended to plant near beehives. Pliny mentions a satureia as a herb for culinary use, possibly derived from the Arabic sattur.