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Mackerel, Caveach
Divide large fresh fish, after being well cleansed and dried in a cloth, into 5 pieces, and rub each piece with spice, as follows: Pound an ounce of black pepper and 6 blades of mace; mix them when pounded with 2 ounces of salt, and 1/2 ounce of grated nutmeg. Use all the above spices for 6 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.
Caveach is one of the old oil-and-vinegar fish preserves, and the method it relies on is the reason it cannot be reproduced today. The notes below explain the terms and then the hazard.
- The keeping instruction is the problemFried fish packed in a jar, sealed under a layer of butter or oil and left for six months at room temperature is a textbook anaerobic, low-acid environment. Clostridium botulinum grows in exactly these conditions and produces toxin that no amount of oil, spice or frying will prevent. Use a current, tested recipe if you want pickled or soused mackerel.
- The vinegar is not measured"Good vinegar" in the period covered anything from sharp wine vinegar to a weak household brew, and the fish itself dilutes whatever goes into the jar. Safe acid preservation depends on a known final pH, which this method has no way of reaching or verifying.
- Mackerel is an added riskMackerel is high in histidine, and scombroid poisoning develops when the fish is held warm before or during processing. Histamine is heat-stable and is not destroyed by frying or by pickling, so a long ambient storage period compounds it.
- Blades of maceA blade is one piece of the lacy aril that surrounds the nutmeg seed; ground, a blade is often reckoned at roughly a quarter teaspoon, so six blades come to something like a teaspoon and a half. Whole blades vary a good deal in size, so treat any such figure as rough.
- The spice quantitiesAn ounce of black pepper is about four tablespoons ground, two ounces of salt about three tablespoons, half an ounce of nutmeg about two tablespoons grated. That is a heavy dry rub, intended as much for preservation as for flavour.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it sets firm and does not go rancid as quickly. Here it is doing the work of a seal, floated on top of the vinegar to shut out air — the same principle as a potted-meat cap, and the same principle that makes the jar dangerous.
- Scale of the batchThe spice mixture is given for six fish, while the cutting instruction speaks of a single large fish in five pieces. Read the spice quantity as the batch total and divide it by the number of fish actually used.