Mackerel, Broiled
INGREDIENTS. - Mackerel, pepper and salt to taste, a small quantity of oil. AVERAGE COST, 4d. each.
Mackerel should never be washed when intended to be broiled, but merely wiped very clean and dry, after taking out the gills and insides. Open the back and put in a little pepper, salt and oil; broil it over a clear fire, turn it over on both sides and also on the back. When sufficiently cooked, the flesh can be detached from the bone, which will be in about 10 minutes for a small mackerel. Chop a little parsley, work it up in the butter, with pepper and salt to taste and a squeeze of lemon-juice and put it in the back. Serve before the butter is quite melted, with a maître d'hôtel sauce in a tureen.
TIME.-Small mackerel, 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from April to July.
A plain grilled mackerel with parsley butter, and the method still works — the only real changes are the heat source and the fact that most cooks now buy the fish already gutted.
- The hinge: dry fish, hot grillBeeton's insistence on wiping rather than washing is about getting skin dry enough to crisp instead of steam. Pat the fish thoroughly with kitchen paper and give the grill or pan several minutes to reach full heat before the mackerel goes near it.
- "Open the back"This means splitting the fish down the backbone from the top so it opens flat, rather than butterflying from the belly — ask a fishmonger to spatchcock it, or run a knife along either side of the spine yourself. Flattened this way a mackerel cooks evenly in the time given.
- A clear fireShe means an open coal or wood fire burnt down past the smoke to steady radiant heat. A gas or charcoal grill at high heat, or an overhead broiler on its top setting with the fish 3–4 inches below the element, is the equivalent.
- TimingTen minutes total for a small mackerel is about right for a fish of 8–10 oz, turned once or twice; larger fish of a pound or more want 12–14. It is done when the flesh at the thickest point lifts cleanly from the bone, exactly as she says.
- The butterNo quantity is given for the parsley butter. Roughly 2 oz (4 tbsp) softened butter to a tablespoon of chopped parsley, with lemon, salt and pepper, dresses two fish. Have it ready and cold so it is still half-melted at the table.
- Maître d'hôtel sauceMaitre d'hotel sauce -- In Beeton's usage this is essentially the same parsley-lemon butter, either softened or worked into a little melted butter and sent up separately. The recipe therefore calls for the flavouring twice over; one or the other is enough.
- Cost and seasonFourpence each was cheap for fish, though Beeton prices herrings and sprats lower still. "April to July" reflects British inshore mackerel; the fish is now available most of the year, though it spoils faster than almost any other and should smell of nothing but the sea.
- YieldOne mackerel per person, with bread and butter or plain boiled potatoes.
Mackerel was the classic cheap, oily, perishable fish of nineteenth-century Britain — so quick to spoil that London street sellers were long permitted to cry it on Sundays, an exemption often noted as unique among wares. Because the flesh is said to spoil unusually fast after landing, mackerel was, one imagines, generally eaten close to the coast or close to the catch, and cooked by the fastest method available: split, seasoned and put straight over the fire. The sharp accompaniments Beeton reaches for here — lemon juice, parsley, and in her other mackerel recipes gooseberry or fennel sauce — all answer the same problem, which is cutting the richness of a very fatty fish. The maître d'hôtel butter she calls for is one of the small French flourishes that run through her book, a nod to restaurant practice grafted onto a thoroughly plain English supper.