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To Cook Salt Mackerel
Soak well over night in water, next morning drain well and drop in boiling water for three minutes; take it up very carefully, place it on a dish and pour over the fish melted butter.
The mackerel may be prepared in the same manner, and placed on a gridiron, broiled nicely, put on a dish and pour melted butter over it.
A two-line method that assumes you already have a barrel of salt-cured mackerel in the pantry. The soak is the whole recipe; everything after it is a two-minute finish.
- The soak is the hingeOvernight in cold water, skin side up in a wide dish so the salt sinks away from the flesh rather than sitting against it. Change the water two or three times if you can, and refrigerate rather than leaving it on the counter.
- How salty is your fishModern salt mackerel fillets are generally cured more lightly than the hard, dry-salted barrel fish of the period. Six to eight hours is often enough; taste a corner of the flesh after soaking, and if it is still fiercely salty give it another hour in fresh water.
- Three minutes is correctThe blanch is only there to firm the flesh and carry off the last surface salt. Mackerel is oily and cooks fast, and a longer boil breaks the fillet into flakes you cannot lift out whole.
- Lifting it out"Take it up very carefully" means use a wide slotted fish slice or two. Boiled salt mackerel has almost no structural integrity; some cooks poach it on a plate set in the pan so it can be lifted in one piece.
- The gridironA gridiron is a metal grate set over coals — a broiler or a hot ridged grill pan does the same work. Broil skin side up a few inches from the element for five to six minutes, until the skin blisters. Note that 'prepared in the same manner' is ambiguous: it may mean the overnight soak alone, or the soak followed by the three-minute blanch before broiling.
- Melted butterNineteenth-century 'melted butter' could mean either plain melted or drawn butter or a flour-thickened butter sauce; the recipe does not say which. A squeeze of lemon or a little chopped parsley cuts the oiliness of the fish.
- YieldA single split mackerel of about a pound serves two as a breakfast or light supper dish. Boiled potatoes are a natural accompaniment.
Salt mackerel was a New England breakfast staple long before it was a recipe worth writing down. Mackerel run in vast schools off the North Atlantic coast in summer, spoil quickly because of their oil content, and so were split, gutted and packed in salt barrels almost as soon as they were landed — graded by size and sold by the barrel through the winter. The overnight soak was so routine in nineteenth-century households that cookbooks often mention it only in passing, as here. The two variants offered in a single short paragraph, boiled and broiled, reflect how the fish was actually eaten: quickly, in the morning, with nothing on it but butter. The rise of refrigeration and rail-carried fresh fish pushed salt mackerel out of the everyday breakfast, though it survives in Irish and Caribbean cooking.