Mackerel, Baked
INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons.-4 mackerel, a nice delicate forcemeat, 3 oz. of butter; pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Clean the fish, take out the roes and fill up with forcemeat and sew up the slit.
Flour and put them in a dish, heads and tails alternately, with the roes; and between each layer put some little pieces of butter and pepper and salt. Bake for 1/2 an hour and either serve with plain melted butter or a maître d'hôtel sauce.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE from April to July.
Note.-Baked mackerel may be dressed in the same way as baked herrings and may also be stewed in wine.
A plain Victorian bake that assumes you can bone, stuff and stitch a whole fish, and that you already know what a forcemeat is. The instructions are thin on temperature and generous on time, so both need pinning down.
- Oven temperatureNo setting is given; the original was written for a range judged by eye and hand. A modern moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits a whole oily fish; hotter risks drying the flesh before the stuffing warms through.
- TimingHalf an hour suits four large mackerel of about a pound each, packed close in a dish. Ordinary 10-12 oz fish will be done in 20-25 minutes, when the flesh at the backbone lifts cleanly from the bone.
- ForcemeatThe "nice delicate forcemeat" is left unspecified. A Beeton-pattern bread forcemeat -- fine breadcrumbs, suet or butter, lemon peel, parsley, herbs, nutmeg and egg to bind -- is the usual sort, and anything along those lines works; keep it loose, as it swells.
- The roesThey are baked alongside the fish rather than inside it, and they cook faster than the flesh. If your fishmonger has removed them, the recipe is unaffected "”the butter, pepper and salt between the layers do the work.
- Sewing upA trussing needle and cotton string is the period method. Cocktail sticks laced with string, or simply laying the fish cut side down in the dish, holds the stuffing just as well and saves picking thread out at the table.
- BuyingMackerel is among the most perishable of the common fish and turns quickly once out of the water. Buy fish with firm flesh, clear eyes and no ammoniac smell, and cook it the day you get it.
- Ma"tre d'h"´tel sauceIn 1861 this meant melted butter worked with lemon juice, chopped parsley, pepper and salt "” not the compound butter pat sold under the name now. Either suits the fish; the acid is the point.
- Cost and yieldTwo shillings for a dish serving eight tells you mackerel was cheap food. Four fish of modern size will feed four to six as a main course rather than eight.
Mackerel occupies an odd place in Victorian fish cookery: abundant, cheap and much loved, but so quick to spoil that it was the one fish London street sellers were permitted to cry on Sundays, a licence traced to seventeenth-century Sunday observance legislation and still remarked on in Beeton's day. Because it would not keep, it was eaten hard in its season and barely at all outside it -- hence the April-to-July note, when the shoals came inshore. The oiliness that makes it spoil also makes it well suited to dry baking with butter and a sharp sauce, and the standard Victorian partners -- gooseberry, sorrel, lemon in the maitre d'hotel -- are all acidic. Stuffing a whole fish with a bread forcemeat stretched four fish across a large table and gave the household a use for stale crumbs and the suet already in the larder.