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Caveach Fish
Clean some large fish, either cod, salmon, or mackerel, and cut them into slices. Rub each slice well with pepper, salt, and nutmeg; and fry them in hot butter or lard till they are lightly browned. Let them get cold, then lay them in jars. Boil some spices in vinegar, allowing two finely-minced shallots, two cloves, a blade of mace, a quarter of an ounce of black peppercorns, and two bay-leaves to a quart of vinegar. Nearly fill the jars with this, when cold, and put on the top a little salad-oil. Tie them down closely. The fish will keep good for some months. It should be prepared when the fish is in full season, and when served, the pieces should be piled in the middle of the dish, and a salad served round them. Probable cost, cod, 6d. per pound; salmon, 1s. 2d. per pound; mackerel, 4d. to 6d.
This is a preserved-fish recipe, and the preservation method is the problem: cooked fish held under vinegar and a seal of oil, at room temperature, for months. The points below explain why the method fails by current standards rather than how to rescue it.
- The core hazardFish submerged in liquid under a layer of salad oil and tied down closely is a low-oxygen environment. Clostridium botulinum type E is associated with fish and grows without oxygen at refrigerator temperatures, let alone in a larder; the dish is served cold, so nothing in the recipe would destroy any toxin that formed.
- Acidity is unmeasuredVinegar preserves only when the finished product is reliably below pH 4.6 throughout. The fish here is fried, cooled and packed in bulk slices, so the interior may never acidify to that level, and the strength of the vinegar is nowhere specified. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acetic acid content.
- No heat processingThe jars are filled with cold vinegar and simply tied down. There is no boiling-water or pressure process, no hermetic seal, and no measured salt concentration — none of the controls a modern pickled-fish procedure depends on.
- "Some months" at ambient temperatureThe claim that the fish keeps good for months is the whole point of the recipe and the whole reason it cannot be followed. Any modern pickled or soused fish is a refrigerated product with a short life, made to a tested formula.
- If you want the dishEscabeche of mackerel is still made, and a current tested recipe with specified vinegar strength and refrigerated storage should be used instead.
- Reading the original unitsA quart of vinegar is 40 fl oz imperial, about 1.14 litres; a quarter-ounce of peppercorns is roughly one level tablespoon. A blade of mace is one flattened piece of the outer covering of nutmeg, usually reckoned at roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon ground.
- The pricesThe costs given are pre-decimal: 6d. is sixpence, a fortieth of a pound sterling. Mackerel at 4d. to 6d. against salmon at 1s. 2d. shows how far apart the two fish sat in a Victorian market.
Caveach is the English form of the Spanish escabeche, a vinegar-and-spice preparation for fried fish that is generally traced back through the Iberian peninsula to the medieval Arab sikbāj, itself a Persian vinegar stew. The word turns up in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, usually attached to mackerel, and the technique arrived alongside other Anglo-Iberian and West Indian borrowings — Jamaican escovitch fish is the same idea by another route. In a book like Cassell's the recipe sits in a long tradition of household preserving: before reliable refrigeration, a glut of mackerel or a large cod had to be dealt with at once, and frying, spicing and drowning the fish in vinegar was one answer among several, alongside salting, drying and smoking. The instruction to prepare it "when the fish is in full season" is the honest heart of the entry, and the serving suggestion — the slices piled in the centre of the dish with salad round them — shows it was meant for a cold supper table rather than a store cupboard of last resort.