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Salad of Salt Mackerel
Freshen the fish carefully before cooking. Use equal parts of fish, flaked, and cold boiled potatoes. If potatoes are specially prepared for the purpose, cut them in cubes or balls, blanch, and cook in well-seasoned beef stock; drain, and add, when cold, to the fish. Season with French dressing.
Arrange on a bed of cress and sift the yolk of an egg over the whole.
A salt-fish salad from the era when barrelled mackerel was a pantry staple. Almost everything depends on the first sentence: freshening the fish properly.
- Freshening the fishSoak whole salt mackerel skin side up in a deep dish of cold water for 12 to 24 hours in the refrigerator, changing the water three or four times. Skin side up lets the salt fall away rather than settle back into the flesh. Taste a shred before cooking; if it is still aggressively salty, keep soaking.
- Cooking itAfter freshening, poach the fish in barely simmering water for 8 to 10 minutes, or broil it, then cool and flake, discarding skin and the row of pin bones. Do not boil hard, which shreds the flesh into mush.
- Buying it nowSalt mackerel is still sold in Portuguese, Caribbean and Nordic shops, often as fillets in brine rather than dry salt; brined fillets need only a few hours of soaking. Smoked mackerel is not a substitute here, though a hot-smoked fillet makes a decent modern version of the salad.
- "Blanch" the potatoesBlanching here most likely means dropping the cut potatoes briefly into boiling water rather than cooking them through; they finish in the beef stock, which is where the flavour comes from. Drain them as soon as they are tender so they hold their cube or ball shape.
- French dressingAt this date this is simply oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked at the moment of serving; period proportions run from about two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweetened orange-red bottled dressing of later decades.
- The sifted yolkHard-cook an egg, cool it, and press the yolk through a fine sieve over the finished salad. Sieving is the point; a chopped yolk looks coarse next to the fine gold crumb the sieve gives. The white can be chopped and scattered as well if you want the contrast.
- CressWatercress was probably meant, though garden or land cress works. Dress the leaves lightly or not at all so the bed stays crisp under the potatoes.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; one large mackerel with an equal weight of potato should serve about four as a first course or light lunch. Assemble and dress at the last minute; the potatoes drink up the vinegar and go dull if the salad stands.
Salt mackerel was a staple of nineteenth-century American kitchens, sold by the barrel and often said to have been served at breakfast, so a cookbook of the period could assume every reader knew how to freshen it. Janet McKenzie Hill compiled Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties out of the Boston Cooking School tradition at the very end of the 1890s, when composed salads of cooked fish and potato bound with a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing were fashionable at luncheon tables. The detail of cooking the potato cubes in seasoned beef stock suggests a habit of building flavour into a bland ingredient rather than masking it with sauce. The sieved yolk scattered over the top is the garnish later cooks came to call mimosa, after the yellow blossom it resembles.