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To Pickle Rock
Cut a rock-fish into pieces and put in a kettle with sufficient water to cover it. Put in a handful of salt, some white pepper, one tablespoonful allspice, a few cloves and mace.
When the fish is nearly done, add a quart of vinegar. In putting away, use as much liquor as will cover it.--Mrs.J.W.S.
A Chesapeake vinegar pickle for cooked fish, meant as a way to keep a large catch a few extra days. The hinge is the vinegar: it goes in at the end, after the flesh has set, not at the start.
- What "rock" meansIn Virginia and Maryland, rock or rockfish is the striped bass (Morone saxatilis), not the Pacific rockfish sold under that name on the West Coast. Any firm-fleshed fish that holds together in pieces — striped bass, black sea bass, drum — behaves the same way here.
- Cut the pieces thickCrosswise steaks or thick chunks on the bone hold their shape in the acid; thin fillets shred. Leaving the skin on helps the pieces survive being lifted out of the pot.
- "A handful of salt"Read this loosely as 2 to 3 tablespoons or more, depending on how much water it takes to cover the fish; the recipe fixes neither quantity. It is enough to season the flesh firmly.
- Whole spices, not groundAllspice, cloves and mace are meant whole here. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed and is sold as blades; two or three blades is plenty. Ground spices will cloud the liquor and turn it muddy.
- Timing"Nearly done" for bass steaks in barely simmering water is roughly 6 to 8 minutes, when the flesh has turned opaque but still clings at the bone. Add the vinegar then and give it two or three minutes more off a hard boil. Adding vinegar earlier, or boiling hard at any point, tightens the proteins and gives you cottony fish.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar ran variable; use a standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. A quart sours the cooking liquor noticeably, but once diluted by the poaching water it falls well short of a preserving-strength brine.
- "In putting away"The fish must be fully submerged in the strained, spiced liquor in a nonreactive container — glass or glazed stoneware, never bare aluminum or iron. This is a refrigerator pickle by modern standards: keep it cold and eat it within four or five days. It is not a shelf-stable preserve, and no sealing or processing instruction in the original makes it one.
- Yield and servingA 3 lb fish gives six or so portions. Serve the pieces cold with some of the liquor spooned over, with brown bread and butter, as a first course or a hot-weather supper.
"Rock" is the Chesapeake's own name for striped bass, and its abundance in the tidal Potomac and the Bay explains why a book like Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions of Virginia housewives — hence the initialed attributions) needed a way to deal with more fish than one dinner could absorb. Pickling cooked fish in a spiced vinegar is old and widely spread: it is the same principle as the escabeche of Spain and Latin America, the soused mackerel of English kitchens, and the pickled herring of northern Europe, all of them relying on salt, acid and whole warm spices to buy a few days in a house without ice. Allspice, cloves and mace are generally thought of as the usual warm spices of the Anglo-American pickling shelf, and seem to have been widely available by the 1870s and used across everything from cucumbers to oysters. The recipe assumes a cool cellar or a springhouse, and a household that would finish the jar quickly.