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ROES, MACKEREL, TIMBALE OF (a la Sefton)
Take the soft roes of four large mackerel. Do not wash the fish, for the roes would then turn black and soft. Put the roes in melted butter, without any salt; let the butter cover them, and either bake them in the oven, or let them stew on a stove. Take care not to break them. When they are done, lay them on a sheet of white paper to drain; dust a little salt over them, and cut them into small dice as neatly as possible. Put these into small pates, which keep hot, and make the following sauce, which is to be put afterwards into the pates. Take two spoonfuls of bechamel, add a small bit of butter with pepper and salt. Refine this sauce with some thick cream. Keep it hot, fill the pates in which the soft roes are, but mind that it is liquid enough to penetrate the roes. Above all, send up quite hot.
A Victorian savoury built on soft mackerel roe — milt, not eggs — poached in butter, diced, and bound with a cream-enriched béchamel in small pastry cases. The whole thing hangs on gentle heat: the roes must never come near a boil or they break into paste.
- What "soft roe" isSoft roe is milt, the sperm sac of the male fish, pale and custardy; hard roe is the egg mass and behaves quite differently. Order it from a fishmonger rather than expecting to find it packaged, and use it the day you buy it — it sours fast.
- "Pates" are pastry casesHere pates most likely means small baked shells of short or puff pastry (petits pates) rather than a spread, though the title's "timbale" leaves room for small moulds. Keep them warm while you finish the sauce, as the recipe directs.
- Butter poaching, not baking hotWhere the recipe says bake or stew, keep the butter well below a simmer; the original gives neither temperature nor time, so judge by eye. The roes should firm and turn opaque, not colour.
- Why no salt in the butterThe likely reason is that salt draws moisture through the thin membrane and the roes slump and split. Salting after draining, as the recipe directs, is the right order and worth keeping.
- Do not wash the roesThe instruction is sound: the original warns that washed roes turn black and soft, and water waterlogs the thin membrane. Lift them straight from the fish.
- Spoonfuls and quantitiesA Victorian "spoonful" in a sauce context is usually taken as a tablespoon, so roughly 2 tbsp bechamel; the recipe gives no quantity for the cream beyond "some". "Refine" here means enrich and thin -- the sauce must be liquid enough to penetrate the roes, as the original insists.
- YieldFour mackerel yield enough roe for a few small cases -- a savoury course or a light first course. It does not reheat; assemble at the last moment and serve immediately, as the original insists.
Dishes labelled à la Sefton run through nineteenth-century English cookery books and are generally traced to the household of the Earls of Sefton, the Molyneux family of Croxteth, whose second earl had a reputation as a Regency gourmet; the name attached itself to several butter- and cream-rich preparations. Soft mackerel roe belonged to the older English tradition of the savoury — a small, hot, strongly flavoured dish served near the end of dinner — and it appeared in these books because mackerel came ashore in enormous cheap quantities in spring and early summer, milt included, at a time when fishmongers sold the fish whole and the roe was a byproduct rather than a delicacy. It is, above all, an exercise in handling a fragile protein at low heat.