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Mackerel, Baked and Stuffed
Take four mackerel, two tea-spoonfuls of parsley, one tea-spoonful of chopped onion, two ounces of bread-crumbs, half an ounce of suet, one egg, pepper, and salt. Cut the mackerel down the back, take out the backbone, and lay the fish flat on the pastry-board. Make a stuffing of the bread-crumbs, suet, parsley, and onion; flavour with pepper and salt; bind together with the egg; divide the stuffing into four, and lay a portion on each fish; roll up the fish from tail to head, and skewer or tie it in place. Bake for twenty minutes in a moderate oven.
A straightforward Victorian forcemeat-stuffed fish that still works, provided the mackerel are fresh and the oven is hot enough to set the roll before it dries.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" is conventionally read today as about 350F (175C); the book itself gives no temperatures. Twenty minutes suits mackerel of roughly 10-12 oz each; larger fish need 25-30 minutes. The flesh should be opaque to the bone and register 145F at the thickest part of the roll.
- SuetHalf an ounce of beef suet is there for richness and moisture in the stuffing. Shredded packet suet works, or substitute the same weight of cold butter, finely diced.
- Boning the fishThe recipe wants the fish opened flat down the back, not the belly — cut along either side of the dorsal fin, then lift the backbone out from the head end. A fishmonger will do it if asked for mackerel "kite-boned" or butterflied from the back.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of breadcrumbs and one egg make a stiff forcemeat; if it will not hold, add a spoonful of milk rather than a second egg, which would make it wet and sloppy in the fish.
- SkeweringWooden cocktail sticks or a loop of kitchen twine both work. Roll from tail to head as directed — the thicker shoulder end sits on the outside and protects the thin tail from overcooking.
- FreshnessMackerel is an oily fish that spoils faster than white fish and develops histamine (scombroid) if held warm. Buy it stiff, bright-eyed and smelling of the sea, keep it cold, and cook it the day you buy it.
- YieldFour stuffed mackerel serve four as a main course with potatoes, or eight as a first course if each roll is halved after baking.
Mackerel was the cheap, abundant fish of the British nineteenth-century table u so perishable that it was one of the few goods licensed for sale on Sundays in London, and street cried the moment the boats landed. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households in the 1870s and after, treats it repeatedly, and here stuffs it with a plain breadcrumb-and-suet forcemeat of a type common in Victorian cookery books. The suet-and-crumb stuffing was the era's workhorse binder, deployed as readily in a shoulder of mutton as in a fish, and the pairing of oily mackerel with onion and parsley reflects an old and well-founded instinct that this fish wants something sharp or aromatic against its richness u the same logic that gives us mackerel with gooseberry sauce.