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Fish Left-Overs: Mackerel
HOW TO COOK SALT FISH Stuffed Salt Mackerel. a Freshen 2 fish by soaking six or eight hours, wipe, dry, and squeeze lemon juice over the flesh side. Lay 1 fish in the bottom of a baking pan, and cover with a thick dressing made of bread crumbs well seasoned with parsley, pepper, salt, butter, and bits of thin lemon peel. Lay the other fish on this dressing and baste with melted butter and hot water.
Bake until brown, remove to a hot platter without disturbing the layers, and cover the top with bread crumbs moistened in melted butter and baked brown. Garnish with parsiey.
Baked Salt Mackerel.
Soak the mackerel in cold water over night, placing the split side down. Cut off the fins and tail.
Wash and put in a baking pan with the split side up. Mix a teaspoonful flour with a little milk and stir into pint milk. Pour this over the mackerel, and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. Just before the fish is done, add a teaspoonful butter.
Boiled Salt Mackerel.
Soak the mackerel over night; wash and put in a flat saucepan; cover with hot water, and cook slowly twenty minutes. Serve with cream, butter, egg, tomato, brown, or parsley sauce.
Broiled Salt Mackerel.
Soak over night; wash and wipe.
Broil over clear coals for twelve minutes. Put the split side over fire first. Season with butter, and serve hot.
Broiled Salt Salmon or Halibut.
If fish is very salt, freshen for an hour or two in cold water; if merely smoked and slightly salted, wash and cut in small pieces about an inch thick. Season well with pepper and salt, and wrap each slice in tough paper well buttered. Twist the ends so the fish is inside a paper bag.
Put in a broiler, and move over a clear fire for about eight minutes.
Take the fish from the paper cases and pour egg sauce over it.
Five short methods for salt-cured mackerel and salt salmon, from a period when a barrel of salted fish was a pantry staple rather than a specialty purchase. The hinge is the soak: everything else here is quick and forgiving, but under-freshened fish is inedible.
- Soaking is the whole recipeThe book gives six to eight hours for the stuffed version and overnight for the rest; a heavily cured fish wants the longer soak. The baked recipe specifies split side down, so the salt falls away rather than settling back into the flesh. Changing the water two or three times is usual practice. Taste a shred of the thick shoulder before cooking.
- Finding the fishBarrel salt mackerel is now most easily found through Portuguese, Caribbean, Greek and Scandinavian grocers, often as whole split fish in brine or as boneless fillets. Hot-smoked mackerel is not a substitute here — it is already cooked and needs no freshening. Salt cod fillet behaves similarly but is thicker and wants a considerably longer soak.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350-375F. Half an hour is right for a split fish under milk; the fish is done when the flesh at the backbone flakes, and it will keep cooking in the hot milk after it comes out.
- The milk bakeA teaspoonful of flour worked into a little milk and then stirred into a pint is barely a thickening; it leaves little more than a thin sauce in the pan. Whole milk is the safer choice.
- Broiling timesTwelve minutes over clear coals suits a whole split fish. Under a modern gas or electric broiler, figure six to eight minutes total, split side to the heat first as the recipe directs, and watch it — salt fish is lean at the tail and scorches there before the shoulder is warm.
- "Tough paper" bagsA paper-case method of the kind known as en papillote. Use parchment, well buttered, ends twisted shut. Do not use waxed paper or a paper bag near an open flame or broiler element; parchment on a sheet pan at 425F for eight to ten minutes gets you a similar steamed slice.
- Egg sauceAssumed knowledge for the book's readers: a plain white sauce — butter, flour, milk — with coarsely chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in at the end, seasoned with pepper and a little lemon or mace. It is a standard partner to salt fish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A whole split mackerel will serve about two, so the stuffed version, using two fish sandwiched around dressing, should serve roughly four.
- Salt at the tableSeason the stuffing and the sauces lightly and taste before adding more. Even a well-soaked fish carries enough salt to season what surrounds it, and the bread-crumb dressing here is already given salt in the original.
Salt mackerel belonged to the American breakfast table for most of the nineteenth century, sold by the barrel and numbered chiefly by size and quality out of the New England fishery. It was cheap, kept without ice, and could be freshened overnight in a bucket by the sink; a general household manual like this one treats it as a matter of five variations rather than a recipe worth explaining. The placement under "Fish Left-Overs" is a small editorial oddity: nothing here is a leftover, but salt fish sat in the same mental category as odds and ends, food you dealt with economically rather than served for company. The buttered-paper broiling method for salt salmon is a domestic kin of cooking en papillote, generally traced to French professional practice and filtering into English-language household books through the later 1800s. By the time refrigeration and rail freight made fresh fish ordinary inland, the barrel disappeared from the American pantry, and salt mackerel became what it is now \\ rather than the default.