Mackerel, Boiled
INGREDIENTS.-Mackerel, 1/4 lb. of salt to each gallon of water. AVERAGE COST, 4d. each.
Cleanse the inside of the fish thoroughly, and lay it in the kettle, with sufficient water to cover it, with salt as above; bring them gradually to boil, skim well and simmer gently till done; dish them on a hot napkin, heads and tails alternately and garnish with fennel. Fennel sauce and plain melted butter are the usual accompaniments to boiled mackerel; but caper or anchovy sauce is sometimes served with it.
TIME. After the water boils, 10 minutes; for large mackerel allow more time.
SEASONABLE from April to July.
Note. When variety is desired, fillet the mackerel, boil it and pour over parsley and batter; send some of this to table in a tureen.
ENTS. - M
A plain poach, and the whole thing hinges on heat control and the freshness of the fish. Two of the original's figures have been mangled in printing, so read the salt and the sauce with care.
- The salt quantity is brokenThe fraction has dropped out of the text: "lb. of salt to each gallon of water" would be a brine of curing strength. A quarter-pound of salt to the gallon is the proportion given for boiling fish elsewhere in Beeton, and is what to use here.
- "Kettle" means a fish kettleA long, shallow, lidded pan with a perforated lifting plate, so the fish can be raised out whole without breaking. A wide sauté pan or deep roasting tin on the hob does the same job; lower the fish on a sling of doubled foil or muslin.
- Start cold, never boilStart cold, and keep it gentle -- "Bring them gradually to boil... simmer gently" is the instruction that matters; the water is brought up to the boil but the fish is not cooked at a rolling one. Mackerel is soft-fleshed and oily, and a hard boil splits the skin and shreds the flanks. Hold the water at a bare tremble.
- Ten minutes is for a whole fishThe recipe counts ten minutes from the moment the water boils, and allows longer for large mackerel. A whole fish of around 12 oz will take roughly that at a bare simmer; it is done when the flesh parts from the backbone at the thickest point. Fillets, as in the note, need only a few minutes.
- "Parsley and batter"A misprint for parsley and butter, i.e. melted butter with chopped parsley stirred in. Send it to the table hot in a tureen, as the original says.
- Fennel sauceMelted butter or a thin white sauce with a good handful of chopped fennel leaf, not the bulb, which was not the common English vegetable then. Fresh dill is the nearest substitute in flavour if fennel fronds are hard to find.
- Seasonality and freshnessApril to July was the Atlantic mackerel season and also the reason for the note: mackerel spoils faster than almost any other fish, and by long-standing statutory exception mackerel could be cried and sold in London on a Sunday when other trade could not. Buy it stiff, bright-eyed and smelling of nothing but sea, and cook it the day you buy it.
- YieldOne mackerel per person is the likely intention, given the price quoted per fish and the alternating heads and tails on the serving napkin. The hot folded napkin presumably absorbed poaching water; a warmed platter and a moment's draining does the same.
Boiled mackerel belongs to a class of dishes that made sense only in a country with a fast fish trade and a short season. Mackerel are so perishable that in nineteenth-century London they are often said to have been the one commodity hawkers could legally cry on a Sunday, and cheapness followed: fourpence a fish put it within reach of households that could not think about turbot. The pairing with fennel is traditionally held to be an old one, and the logic is the same as gooseberry with mackerel, another traditional English match — something sharp or aromatic to cut a very oily flesh. Beeton's method, with its cold-water start and its salted poaching liquor, is of a piece with Victorian treatments of fish served whole, and the direction to arrange the fish heads and tails alternately on a napkin reflects a period when the appearance of the dish at table was drilled as firmly as the cooking of it.