Home › Cookery › Boiled Mackerel
Boiled Mackerel
Well wash the fish, put it into nearly boiling water with one tablespoonful salt in it; boil up quickly, then let it simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, and if the fish be very large, a few minutes longer. Serve in a hot dish.--Mrs.B.
A plain poach with almost nothing to it, which means the only variable that matters is time. Fifteen minutes will overcook any mackerel a modern fishmonger sells.
- The timing is the whole recipeA whole mackerel of 1 to 1½ lb is done in 8 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer; measure the fish at its thickest point and allow roughly 10 minutes per inch. The flesh should just come away from the backbone. The quarter hour here assumes a considerably larger fish than the 12- to 16-inch mackerel usually on sale.
- "Boil up quickly, then simmer"Bring the water back to a boil after the fish goes in, then drop the heat at once so the surface only shivers. A rolling boil splits the skin and breaks the flakes apart, and mackerel is soft-fleshed enough that this happens fast.
- Water and saltNo quantity is given for either. Use enough water to cover the fish by an inch — for one or two fish that is roughly 2 to 3 quarts depending on the pan — and a tablespoon of salt suits that volume. Adding more salt does not season the fish appreciably; it seasons the water.
- The vesselThe recipe names no vessel; a fish kettle with a lifting trivet is what a household of the period would most likely have used. A wide sauté pan or a roasting pan on the stovetop works; lift the fish out on a wide spatula or on a sling of cheesecloth, since a whole poached mackerel will not survive being tipped out.
- Freshness matters more than usualMackerel is oily and turns rank quickly. Look for firm flesh, clear eyes and a clean smell; if it smells strongly fishy, poaching in plain water will do nothing to hide it.
- What was meant to go with itA nineteenth-century boiled mackerel was usually served with a sauce — melted butter with chopped parsley, or gooseberry sauce, a traditional English partner for the fish. The recipe gives no clue, but plain poached mackerel wants acid or fat alongside.
- YieldOne mackerel of this size serves one generously or two modestly as part of a larger meal.
Mackerel ran in enormous shoals along the Atlantic coast and was one of the cheapest fish in nineteenth-century American markets, sold fresh where it was landed and heavily salted in barrels everywhere else — much of what inland Virginia households cooked would have been salt mackerel, soaked overnight before boiling. Boiling, or more properly poaching, was the standard treatment for a whole fish in the English tradition this book inherits, and the terseness here is characteristic of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (normally dated 1878, though 1879 appears on later printings), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives; the initials are all the attribution many of them got. The instruction to start the fish in nearly boiling rather than cold water reflects a long-held belief that hot water sealed the surface and kept the flavor in — the reasoning is dubious, but the practice does keep a delicate fish from falling apart during a slow rise to temperature.