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Marinade for Fish, Economical
An excellent and economical marinade that will serve for several occasions, if boiled, skimmed, and bottled closely after use. Brown together in a stewpan, with a lump of butter, two middle-sized onions, two shallots, a small bit of garlic, and a carrot, all minced, and simmer for two or three hours over a slow fire with a pint and a half of cheap claret or British wine; add a bunch of sweet herbs, parsley, two or three cloves, pounded with a dozen Jamaica peppers, salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Strain for use. Fish to be broiled or fried should be laid in a marinade of oil and minced sweet herbs. Sufficient for one pint.
A cooked wine marinade, reduced from a pint and a half down to about a pint. Note that the recipe ends by describing a second, quite different marinade — plain oil and minced herbs — for fish destined for the grill or frying pan.
- Jamaica peppersAllspice berries, a dozen of them, crushed with the cloves. Not peppercorns and not chilli; the flavour is warm and clove-like and cannot be substituted with black pepper.
- British wineIn Cassell's day this generally meant wine made in Britain from raisins or home-grown fruit rather than from imported grapes: cheap and often thin. Any dry red under modest expectation works; a pint and a half imperial is 30 fluid ounces, about 3 3/4 US cups.
- Sweet herbsA bundle of herbs such as thyme, marjoram and bay, which the book does not specify, tied with the parsley stalks so it lifts out cleanly. The wording puts them in after the long simmer rather than at the start.
- The slow fireTwo to three hours at a bare simmer, over the lowest heat that keeps bubbles moving. The point is reduction and extraction, not boiling; the closing 'Sufficient for one pint' appears to be the finished yield.
- Salt at the endBecause the liquid loses a third of its volume, salt only after reduction. Salted at the start it will finish harsh.
- Reusing itThe Victorian instruction to boil, skim and bottle it "closely" assumed a cool larder and frequent use. A marinade that has held raw fish should be brought to a full rolling boil, cooled quickly, and kept in the refrigerator for no more than a few days — not bottled and shelved.
- How long to marinateThe book gives no time. Firm fish steaks take 30 to 60 minutes in the wine marinade; thin fillets 15 to 20, after which the acid begins to whiten and soften the flesh. The oil-and-herb version for broiling or frying wants only 20 minutes.
- YieldAbout a pint, enough to marinate two to three pounds of fish in a shallow dish. Strained, it also makes a serviceable base for a red-wine fish sauce.
Marinade is generally traced through French mariner/marinade to marin, of the sea — an origin some accounts route through Spanish, though that remains one proposal rather than settled fact. The sea-salt sense is still visible in the word, though by the nineteenth century a marinade meant an aromatic wine or vinegar bath rather than plain salt water. Cassell's flags this one as economical for two reasons that both point to a late-Victorian middle-class kitchen: it calls for cheap claret or "British wine" (domestic fruit and raisin wine, the frugal cook's substitute for imported bordeaux), and it treats the marinade as a standing stock to be boiled, skimmed and bottled for reuse rather than thrown out after one fish. The technique of browning aromatics in butter before the long wine simmer is straight French practice, of the sort English cookery writers had been absorbing from professional kitchens since Ude and Soyer; the allspice, cloves and cayenne are the older English spicing habit persisting underneath it.