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Mackerel, with Fine Herbs
Rub butter over a baking-tin, and cover the bottom with a mince of fine herbs, about a dozen small mushrooms, four shallots, and a little parsley, which should be first fried and seasoned with pepper and salt. Lay the fish, neatly trimmed, on the herbs, and cover with fine bread-crumbs; moisten with a little good gravy, or white wine, and put lastly some bits of butter over the crumbs. Bake in a gentle oven, and serve browned with a salamander; squeeze a little lemon-juice over. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. each. Two mackerel will be sufficient for three persons.
A straightforward baked mackerel on a bed of cooked aromatics, written for a coal range and a hand-held browning iron. Two adjustments carry most of the work: pre-cook the herb mixture, and brown the crumbs under a broiler at the end.
- The hinge: fry the mince firstThe mushrooms, shallots and parsley go into the tin already cooked and seasoned. Fifteen to twenty minutes of gentle baking will not soften raw shallot or drive the water out of raw mushrooms, and the dish turns watery underneath the fish.
- "A gentle oven"Roughly 300-325F; the term denotes a slow-to-moderate heat and no exact equivalent can be fixed. The recipe says only "the fish, neatly trimmed", and the point is to set the flesh without splitting the skin.
- SalamanderA cast-iron plate heated red and held over the surface to brown it. A broiler on high for one to two minutes does the same thing; watch it, since buttered crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- "Fine herbs"An anglicisation of fines herbes. Here it appears to cover a chopped savoury mixture rather than the strict French quartet of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, which may be why mushrooms and shallots stand in the list.
- "Good gravy"Not thickened brown sauce but the reduced meat or fish stock a Victorian kitchen kept on hand. Use a few tablespoons of fish or light chicken stock; the wine alternative works equally well. Enough only to moisten the crumbs, not to poach the fish.
- Timing and donenessFifteen to twenty minutes suits split or filleted mackerel of ordinary size. Whole fish of a pound or more need 20-25 minutes at 350F; the flesh should part from the backbone and read 145F at the thickest point.
- Buying mackerelMackerel is oily and deteriorates faster than white fish, which is why old books insist on it being eaten the day it is caught. Buy it bright-eyed and firm, and cook it the day you buy it.
- Cost and yieldThe 4d. to 6d. apiece is a period price note, of no use now beyond showing how cheap mackerel was. Two fish for three people holds if they are half-pound to three-quarter-pound fish; one larger mackerel serves two.
Mackerel occupied an odd place in the Victorian fish trade: abundant, cheap, and so perishable that it was one of the few goods licensed to be cried in London streets on a Sunday. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, gives it dozens of treatments, and this one applies a broadly French method - a buttered dish lined with a cooked duxelles-like mince of mushroom and shallot, crumbs on top, browned at the last moment - to a fish more often served with something sharp to cut its richness, whether the sorrel of French practice or the gooseberry of English. The lemon juice at the end does that job here. The salamander, named for the mythical fire-dwelling lizard, was standard equipment before overhead gas grills; a cook browned gratins and glazed sauces with it all day, and its disappearance is the main reason recipes of this kind read oddly now.