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Mackerel, Baked
Get quite fresh mackerel; they may be known by their almost silvery brightness. If stale, they are limp in body, and red and dull-looking about the eyes and head. When baked, they should be cleaned, the roes taken out, and the cavity filled with a forcemeat delicately prepared, as follows. Put into a basin four ounces of bread-crumbs, two ounces of butter broken into bits, half a tea-spoonful of savoury herbs, a little chopped parsley, an anchovy boned and pounded, pepper, salt, and cayenne, and an egg to cement. Onion, in very small quantity, and shredded very fine, may be added if the flavour be liked. Fill the fish with the forcemeat, lay them neatly in a dish, with pepper, salt, and small bits of butter. Bake half an hour in a moderate oven, serve with maitre d'hotel sauce or plain melted butter. The roes should be placed in the baking-dish with the fish. Probable cost, 2s. Four fish sufficient for six persons.
A straightforward stuffed baked fish that needs little translation, though the oven and the timing both benefit from a number.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350–375F (175–190C). Mackerel is oily and forgiving, but the stuffing sets faster than the flesh cooks, so keep the heat steady rather than high.
- Half an hour is generousThe recipe gives no fish size, but assuming whole mackerel of roughly 12 oz each, stuffed, they will be done in 20-25 minutes at 375F; the flesh should part from the backbone and read 145F at the thickest point. The full half-hour suits larger fish or a crowded dish.
- Buying the fishThe silvery-bright test still holds. Mackerel is unusually rich in oil and turns rancid quickly, so buy it the day you cook it and look for firm bodies and clear, domed eyes.
- Forcemeat proportionsFour ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly two cups of fresh crumbs, with 4 tablespoons of butter. Fresh crumbs, not dried, or the stuffing goes sandy. The egg is a binder only.
- The anchovy"Boned and pounded" means a salt-cured whole anchovy mashed to a paste; two or three oil-packed fillets, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste, do the same work. It is there for salt and depth, not for fish flavour, so season the mixture after adding it.
- Savoury herbsIn this period that usually means dried thyme and marjoram, sometimes with sage or savory. Half a teaspoon of a thyme-marjoram mix is right; the parsley should be fresh.
- The roesSoft (milt) and hard roes were prized and cooked alongside. They cook faster than the fish and are best added for the last ten minutes, or served on toast separately.
- SauceMaitre d'hotel sauce here is butter worked with lemon juice, parsley, pepper and salt, not a flour-thickened sauce. "Melted butter" in Victorian usage is a thin white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, not plain drawn butter.
- YieldFour fish for six is a Victorian portion. Reckon on one whole mackerel per person as a main course today.
Mackerel occupies an odd place in British food history: abundant, cheap, and so quick to spoil that in London it is often said to have been the one fish licensed to be cried in the streets on a Sunday, though the story is more tradition than documented practice. That perishability is why Cassell's opens not with the method but with the freshness test — silvery body, clear eye — advice familiar from nineteenth-century fish entries. Baking a whole mackerel with a breadcrumb and anchovy forcemeat is a thrifty English treatment of a rich fish: the crumbs absorb oil, the anchovy and cayenne cut it, and the roes, which many cooks now discard, went into the dish as a matter of course. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for middle-class households in the later Victorian decades, and the "probable cost, 2s." line is characteristic — the book was as much a budgeting tool for the mistress of the house as a set of instructions for the cook.