Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Keep Sprats
A large quantity of these may be bought cheaply and kept for some weeks by this method. Put on to warm equal quantities of vinegar and water, what you think sufficient to cover your sprats, allowing for wastage; and stir in for every quart of liquor a small saltspoonful of mixed spice, four bay leaves, a shallot minced, a small bunch of bruised thyme, the thin rind of a half lemon, salt and pepper; if you can use tarragon vinegar so much the better. Clean the sprats, remove tails and heads, and lay them in a deep dish. Take your liquor and pour it over the fish, tie a large paper over all, and let them bake in a cool oven for two or three hours; or cook them in a double saucepan; in any case do them very slowly. Put aside to cool, and take out the fish to use as required. They will keep good four weeks.
To Keep Mackerel for a Week It sometimes happens that you can get a great quantity of this fish, very fresh, cheaply, and wish to use it later on. Pickle it thus: Boil a pint of vinegar with six peppercorns, four cloves, four bay leaves, a scrap of mace, a saltspoonful of salt, and the same of made mustard. When this is boiled up put it to cool. Lay your mackerel prepared ready for eating, and sprinkle on each piece some salt, and minced thyme. It may be an hour before using. Then fry the fish, lifting each piece carefully into the hot fat. When fried lay the fish in a deep dish, and pour on each piece your vinegar liquor till all is covered. Cover over with paper such as you use for jam pots, well tied down. You can afterwards heat the fish as you require.
A Brown Dish of Fish Take your fish, which should be herring or mackerel, relieve it of the bones, skin and fins, which you must put to boil for three quarters of an hour in water, with pepper and salt. After that time strain off the liquor, and add to it enough browning to color it well. Then brown quarter of a pound of butter and knead into it two tablespoonfuls of flour, add it, when well mixed, to your liquor, with salt and pepper, a piece of lemon peel, and a dust of mixed spice. Bring all this to the boil and drop in your fish. (Cut in neat fillets.) Let them simmer for twenty minutes, and if too dry pour in some darkly colored gravy. Just before you wish to serve add a good wine glass of claret, or of Burgundy, take out the lemon peel, and pour all on a hot dish. If you do not wish to put wine, the flavor of the sauce is very excellent if you stir into it a dessertspoonful of mushroom ketchup, or a teaspoonful of soy. This brown fish is nice to follow a white soup.
Two of the three methods here are preservation recipes that keep cooked fish for weeks outside refrigeration, and they cannot be reproduced safely. The notes below explain the specific failures and gloss the vocabulary for readers of the text.
- Why the sprats failThe fish are baked very slowly in a cool oven under a paper cover, then held at room temperature for up to four weeks. Slow low-temperature cooking will not destroy Clostridium botulinum spores, and fish left submerged under liquor is effectively deprived of oxygen — conditions in which type E strains, the type associated with fish from cold northern waters, can produce toxin. The paper cover is not an airtight seal and offers no protection against contamination either. The vinegar is diluted with an equal volume of water, and there is no way to know whether the acid penetrates the fish enough to inhibit growth.
- Why the mackerel failsFried fish is covered with a cooled vinegar mixture and tied down under jam-pot paper, then reheated "as you require" over a week. The fish is not sterilised in the liquor, the container is not sealed against contamination, and the whole thing is intended to sit at ambient temperature. Scombroid fish such as mackerel also accumulate histamine when held warm, and histamine is not destroyed by later reheating.
- Not a canning recipe by modern standardsNeither method specifies a jar, a seal, a process time or a temperature, so there is no way to adapt it by adding a pressure canner. If you want to pickle sprats or mackerel, use a current tested recipe with measured acidity and refrigerated storage.
- The brown dish of fishThe third recipe is an ordinary stovetop dish, not a preserve: fish simmered in a stock made from its own bones and skin, thickened with a brown roux. Twenty minutes of simmering is far too long for thin fillets of herring or mackerel, which are done in five or six.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter of a teaspoon. It was a real piece of Victorian and Edwardian tableware, the smallest of the graduated salt, tea and dessert spoons.
- Mixed spiceA British sweet-spice blend, typically cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, coriander and ginger. It is not the same as pickling spice, though "mixed spice" in a savoury pickle context sometimes meant the whole-spice pickling mixture — the text is genuinely ambiguous here.
- BrowningA commercial caramel colouring sold in bottles, used to darken gravies. Modern gravy browning or a little dark caramel does the same job; it contributes colour and slight bitterness, not flavour.
- Mushroom ketchup and soyBoth are savoury liquid seasonings of the period. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still made commercially; the "soy" of 1915 British cookery is soy sauce, used as a colouring and umami agent rather than as an Asian ingredient.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard paste, as opposed to dry mustard powder — a distinction that mattered while mustard was commonly sold as powder, from Durham or Colman's, and mixed up at home.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, with proceeds going to relief work; its recipes are domestic, frugal and, one imagines, often written down from memory by women cooking in unfamiliar kitchens. That frugality is the point of these three entries — sprats and mackerel were the cheapest fish landed on the North Sea coast, sold in gluts, and a household that could buy a large quantity at once needed a way to stretch it. Cooking fish through and drowning it in spiced vinegar is one of the oldest European preservation techniques, the same family as escabeche in Spain and soused herring in the Low Countries and Britain, and it genuinely does slow spoilage; what it does not do, as was not understood in domestic kitchens in 1915, is prevent anaerobic toxin formation. The brown dish, by contrast, is thrift of another kind: bones, skin and fins boiled for stock, a dark roux, and a glass of claret or a spoonful of bottled ketchup to finish — the sort of sauce that turned an oily, cheap fish into something that could be served after a white soup at a proper dinner.