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Fish, Pickled
Any boiled fish may be kept good for another meal by simply mixing equal quantities of the water in which it was boiled and vinegar, together with an onion sliced, some fresh fennel, pepper, and salt. Put the fish into a deep dish, and pour the pickle over it. Baste frequently, that it may be well moistened. It will keep good several days in cold weather.
This is a Victorian larder trick for stretching yesterday's boiled fish, and it depends on conditions no modern kitchen has. The method cannot be made safe by adjusting it, so the notes below explain where it breaks down rather than how to repair it.
- The acid is diluted to nothingThe acid is diluted -- Cutting vinegar half-and-half with fish cooking water halves its strength before it ever touches the food, and the recipe states no vinegar strength at all, so the finished acidity is unknown. Fish flesh is close to neutral and buffers acid readily, so there is no assurance the batch is held below pH 4.6, the line beneath which "pickled" actually means preserved.
- The pathogen this raisesThe pathogens this raises -- Cooked fish held for days in a weak pickle at cellar temperature is a poor keeping method. Listeria monocytogenes multiplies at refrigerator temperature in ready-to-eat fish, and the non-proteolytic Clostridium botulinum type E, which is associated with fish, can grow at temperatures as low as about 3C wherever oxygen is excluded. Need neither produce the smell or slime that a Victorian cook was told to watch for.
- "Cold weather" is not a temperatureThe recipe's only control is an unheated winter larder, which would have varied widely with the weather from near freezing to well above it. The recipe gives a ratio but no absolute quantities and no vinegar strength, no sealing and no heat step, and no way to know what the food actually sat at.
- Basting works against itFrequent basting means the dish is opened, stirred with a spoon and left uncovered again over several days, reintroducing surface organisms into food that is never reheated. Nothing in the process kills anything after the original boiling.
- No boiling of the pickleSouse and escabeche recipes typically bring the vinegar, onion and aromatics to the boil and pour them over the fish hot, which at least pasteurises the liquid and the surface of the fish. This version pours unheated cooking water and vinegar over cooked fish and relies on acid alone.
- If you want pickled fishUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength, a stated fish-to-brine ratio and refrigerated storage with a defined shelf life. Leftover boiled fish is best simply chilled promptly and eaten within a day or two.
Vinegar-and-onion treatments for cooked fish are old and widespread: the Spanish and Portuguese escabeche, the English "souse" for mackerel and herring, and the Jewish sweet-sour pickled fish of central Europe all work on the same principle of acid plus aromatics standing in for cold storage. What marks this entry as household writing is its frugality: it answers the daily problem of what to do with half a boiled fish when there is no ice. Fennel and fish is a long-standing pairing in Mediterranean cooking, and fennel is found in nineteenth-century British fish cookery. The confident closing line - that it will keep several days in cold weather - is a reminder that the domestic refrigerator was still decades away for most readers, and that a cool north-facing larder was treated as a piece of equipment in its own right.