Place the mackerel in a baking-dish; sprinkle with pepper and chopped parsley. Cover with fried bread-crumbs and bits of butter, and moisten with cream. Then bake until brown on top and serve hot with stewed potatoes.
February 12 — No. 12
Dutch
A terse daily-calendar recipe that assumes you know how to clean a mackerel and judge an oven by eye. The quantities are entirely absent, so treat the original as a method and scale it to the fish you have.
- QuantitiesNothing is measured. For two mackerel of about 1 lb each, figure on 1 cup of fried crumbs, 2 tbsp butter in bits, and 1/3 to 1/2 cup cream — enough to moisten the crumbs, not to submerge the fish.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven term to translate, only "bake until brown on top." A moderately hot oven, around 400F, works in practice. Whole mackerel of about 1 lb take roughly 20-25 minutes, fillets 12-15. The flesh should just flake at the backbone.
- Prepare the fish firstThe recipe presumes a fishmonger has gutted and cleaned it. Mackerel is oily and spoils faster than almost any other fish, so buy it stiff, bright-eyed and smelling of the sea, and cook it the day you buy it.
- Fried bread-crumbsThese are not raw crumbs. Toss fresh crumbs in butter in a skillet until golden before they go on the fish, or the topping will steam grey under the cream rather than brown.
- The creamUse heavy or whipping cream. Lower-fat milk or half-and-half is more likely to separate at oven heat; heavy cream holds together and reduces into a sauce in the dish.
- Don't drown the toppingPour the cream around the fish and into the corners of the dish rather than over the crumbs, so the crust stays dry enough to colour.
- "Stewed potatoes"In American cookbooks of this era the term generally means boiled potatoes finished in milk or cream with a little butter and parsley, not a tomato stew.
- YieldOne mackerel of about 1 lb serves one generously or two modestly, so plan on one fish per two people alongside the potatoes.
Mackerel is landed in quantity along the North Sea coast and was cheap enough to be everyday eating; its oiliness also made it a candidate for salting and smoking as much as for the oven. A calendar cookbook of this kind works by attaching a national label to a dish, and the markers here are a butter-and-cream enrichment plus a browned crumb crust, a treatment found across the Low Countries and northern Germany. How faithfully the recipe reflects any actual Dutch kitchen is another matter: the geography in books of this sort was often more decorative than researched.