264 COOKERY OF THE PIKE AND PERCH 



menus in Urbain Dubois' monumental work he 

 directed the kitchens for many years at the Court of 

 Berlin he seems never to have sent up pike for ? 

 small and select party. But at the grand entertain- 

 ments when the guests were counted by the hundred, 

 or at the palace balls, where showy ornamental dishes 

 furnished out the buffets, the pike was invariably 

 paraded. He was either dressed in aspic, with elaborate 

 decoration of hatelets, or it was a gros brocket, a la 

 Regence, or a la Montebello. 



The pike is familiar to the cookery of all European 

 nations, for he is found almost everywhere, though 

 there is a theory that he was not indigenous in the 

 British islands. As a rule, the best trout and the best 

 pike go together, for pike comes to the greatest perfec- 

 tion in swift-flowing and silvery streams. Stoddart, 

 the famous Scottish authority on angling, who should 

 have been a connoisseur in salmon, goes so far as to 

 say that he considered the Teviot pike ' preferable to 

 the general run of salmon captured in that river.' 

 We cannot agree with him, but we have often found 

 the pike a most agreeable change when half surfeited 

 with salmon and sea-trout in the Highlands. Many 

 a day, when the rivers were in spate and the moors 

 unwalkable, have we gone out netting and pot-hunting 

 in waterproofs, with one eye on the sport and another 



