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General Directions to Pickle Fish
123. Wash and clean well the fish inside and out; take out the ribs and cut off the heads; dry them well with a cloth; rub a little saltpetre on the backbone of each fish; season well inside and out with black pepper, Jamaica pepper, and salt; lay them one by one in a pipkin, with alternate layers of sliced onion and bay leaves; pour over them some vinegar with water, according to taste, cover close, and bake them in a bread oven, after the extreme heat has subsided.
A mid-Victorian method for souse-pickled fish, written for a cooling brick bread oven and for keeping the fish some time afterwards. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the preserving method is not one to reproduce.
- Why it fails todayThe recipe is a preservation method with no measured quantities and no temperature anywhere: an unspecified rub of saltpetre, vinegar diluted "according to taste", and a vessel "covered close" in falling oven heat. Nothing in it establishes either an acidity or a nitrite level you can rely on, so there is no way to know the fish is actually preserved.
- The saltpetreSaltpetre is potassium nitrate, now a regulated curing agent used in strictly limited parts per million. "A little rubbed on the backbone" gives no dose at all, and nitrate rubbed onto the surface of a fish is likely doing less than the cook believed. Curing salts today are sold pre-diluted to limit exactly this kind of guesswork.
- Sealed vessel, low acid, long keepingFish held in a closed pot at room temperature, in vinegar that may have been diluted well below the strength needed to inhibit bacteria, is a recognised setting for Clostridium botulinum. The spores survive a bread oven's residual heat, and a close-covered pipkin gives the low-oxygen conditions they favour. If you want soused or pickled fish, use a current recipe with stated vinegar strength and refrigerated storage.
- Jamaica pepperAllspice, the dried berry of Pimenta dioica, called Jamaica pepper through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because of where it was grown. "Black pepper" alongside it is ordinary peppercorn.
- PipkinA small earthenware cooking pot, usually glazed inside, with a handle and often three stubby feet. It went straight into the embers or the oven floor; a modern lidded stoneware or enamelled dish is its nearest relative.
- "A bread oven, after the extreme heat has subsided"A brick oven was fired, swept out, and then used at falling heat as it gave up its stored warmth. This stage sat somewhere in the region of a slow oven and dropped steadily over hours, which is why no time is given: the cook judged by the oven, not the clock, and no fixed temperature was ever reached or held.
- Taking out the ribsThe instruction appears to assume a whole round fish split along the belly with the rib cage lifted away, leaving the backbone, which is what the saltpetre is rubbed on. Handled that way the fish will lie flat in layers. The recipe names no species.