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Mackerel Pie
Clean three middling-sized mackerel, take out the melts and roes, which use in the composition of a forcemeat to stuff the fish. Add bread-crumbs, chopped parsley, a small bit of onion, if liked, mace, pepper, salt, a little butter, and an egg or two to cement the whole. Sew up the fish neatly, and lay them into an ordinary oval flat dish, with an edging of good mashed potatoes or a puff crust. Balls of forcemeat will enrich the dish, and some rich sauce may be poured over the fish when baked; but both forcemeat and sauce should be delicately prepared. Cover with bread-crumbs, and put butter, in bits, over the fish. Time, half an hour, or more. Probable cost, 4d. each. Sufficient for four persons.
A plainly written Victorian fish pie in which the pastry or potato is only a border: the mackerel themselves are the filling, stuffed with their own roe. Freshness of the fish is the thing that decides whether it works.
- Buy the fish the day you cook itMackerel is very oily and goes rancid faster than almost any other fish; a day-old supermarket fillet will taste metallic and no amount of butter and mace will hide it. Look for firm flesh, clear eyes and a clean sea smell, and cook the same day.
- "Melts and roes"The melt (or milt) is the soft roe of the male fish, the hard roe the eggs of the female. Whole mackerel are usually sold gutted now, so ask the fishmonger to keep them or accept that the forcemeat will be made without them — add a little more breadcrumb and butter in their place.
- Fish sizeThe book does not define "middling-sized"; in practice take mackerel of around 12 oz to 1 lb whole. Three of them feed four people, as stated.
- The forcemeatWork to a stuffing that just holds together: about 3 oz fresh breadcrumbs, the chopped roes, a tablespoon of parsley, a teaspoon of finely minced onion, a pinch of ground mace, seasoning, an ounce of softened butter, and one egg. Two eggs make it wet and heavy — add the second only if the mixture will not cohere.
- Closing the fishSewing with a trussing needle and cotton thread works, but two or three cocktail sticks through the belly flaps hold just as well and come out cleanly. Do not overfill; the stuffing swells.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the book assumes a coal range. Bake at 400F (200C) for 25 to 35 minutes, until the thickest flesh flakes from the backbone and the stuffing reaches 165F (74C). Half an hour is right for 1 lb fish; a puff-crust border may need the full 35 minutes to colour.
- Border, not lidThe mashed potato or puff paste is piped or laid around the rim of the dish and browns there. Breadcrumbs and dots of butter go over the exposed fish, so the crumbs crisp rather than steam.
- The "rich sauce"The book leaves this open; a plain veloute or bechamel made with fish stock, finished with cream and a little lemon, suits it. Serve hot and pour over after baking, not before, or the crumbs go soggy. Anything heavily flavoured fights the mackerel.
- Cost note"4d. each" most likely means fourpence per fish rather than per diner, and is a Victorian price, not a modern guide; it survives here as evidence of how cheap the fish then was.
Mackerel was the classic cheap fish of the British spring and summer, landed in enormous quantities along the south and west coasts and hawked through city streets — it was one of the few goods that could legally be cried on a Sunday in London, precisely because it spoiled so quickly that holding it over was ruinous. That perishability shaped the cooking: mackerel recipes in nineteenth-century books lean on sharp or aromatic partners (gooseberry, vinegar, fennel, mace) and on quick baking rather than the long-keeping treatments given to cod or herring. Using the melts and roes in the stuffing is characteristic of Cassell's frugal instinct, wasting nothing from a fish already gutted, while the "edging of good mashed potatoes or a puff crust" marks the dish as a family pie rather than a dinner-party entrée — the sort of thing built in the same oval dish it came to table in.