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Mackerel, Caveach
Divide large fresh fish, after being well cleansed and dried in a cloth, into five pieces, and rub each piece with spice made as follows. Pound an ounce of black pepper and six blades of mace, mix them when pounded with two ounces of salt, and half an ounce of grated nutmeg. Use all the above spices for six fish, rubbing well in, that every piece may be thoroughly seasoned with spice, then fry in oil. Drain, and put the fish neatly into a jar, which fill with good vinegar, adding clarified butter or oil to exclude the air. Tie down closely. Mackerel so prepared will keep for six months. Time, ten minutes to fry. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. each.
The vocabulary here is easy enough to decode, but the preservation method at the heart of the recipe is one that no current food-safety guidance supports. The notes below explain the terms and then why the jar is the problem.
- Why this one failsFried fish is packed into a jar, covered with vinegar and then sealed under a layer of clarified butter or oil and kept for six months at room temperature. Oil over low-acid protein creates exactly the oxygen-free, ambient-temperature environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin, and the recipe gives no acid strength, no measured ratio of vinegar to fish, and no processing step to control it.
- The vinegar is not a guaranteeFor pickled fish to be shelf-stable the whole contents of the jar must be brought to and held at a known pH, which requires a measured acid and time for it to penetrate the flesh. Pouring vinegar over fried fillets acidifies the surface long before it reaches the centre, and the fat layer slows it further. If you want caveached fish, use a current tested recipe and keep it refrigerated.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold either as whole "blades" or ground. Six blades amounts to something on the order of a teaspoon of ground mace, but blades vary so much in size that any such conversion is only a rough guide.
- The spice quantitiesAn ounce of black pepper, two ounces of salt and half an ounce of nutmeg spread across six whole fish is a heavy spicing, rubbed well in so the flesh is seasoned throughout for keeping rather than seasoned for the table.
- "Divide into five pieces"Most likely a large mackerel cut crosswise into five thick steaks, bone in, though the recipe does not specify. "Well cleansed and dried in a cloth" assumes the fish has already been gutted.
- Probable costFourpence to sixpence each was cheap for sea fish, which fits a recipe meant to deal with a quantity of mackerel at once.
"Caveach" is the English rendering of the Spanish escabeche, a vinegar marinade for fried or poached fish that is generally traced back to the medieval Arab dish sikbāj, a sweet-and-sour stew thickened with vinegar; the technique travelled with Iberian cooking into Latin America and the Caribbean, where it survives as escovitch. English cookery books had been printing caveached mackerel since the eighteenth century, and Cassell's includes it for a plain economic reason: mackerel spoils faster than almost any other fish sold in Britain, arriving in enormous summer gluts at a few pence apiece and going soft within a day. Frying and drowning the pieces in spiced vinegar was the household answer to that problem in the era before domestic refrigeration, alongside soused herring and potted char. The confidence of "will keep for six months" reflects a period in which the failure of a preserve was judged by smell and taste rather than by any understanding of anaerobic bacteria.