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Baked Salt Mackerel
Wash a salt mackerel well and soak it over night in three quarts of cold water, laying it with the skin side upward. In the morning lay the fish on its back in a shallow baking-tin not too large for the fish, and pour over it one pint of milk. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven, stirring into the milk at the end of fifteen minutes one tablespoon each of flour and butter, and a sprinkling of pepper, all rubbed together into a smooth paste. Serve with the thickened milk poured around the fish. This makes a very palatable breakfast dish.
A late-Victorian breakfast dish that depends almost entirely on the overnight soak. Get that right and the rest is twenty minutes of unattended baking.
- Skin side up mattersThe recipe specifies laying the fish skin up during the soak; the usual explanation is that the dissolved salt sinks away from the flesh rather than settling back into it, though this is inherited practice rather than demonstrated fact.
- Soaking time and waterThree quarts of cold water is roughly three litres, enough to cover one large split fish. Change the water once if you can, and keep it in the refrigerator rather than on the counter overnight.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period the term is generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400-450F (200-230C). Twenty minutes at that heat should suit a split salt mackerel of about a pound; the flesh should flake.
- Salt mackerel todaySalt-cured mackerel is still sold in Scandinavian, Portuguese and Caribbean shops, usually split and boned. Modern cures are often milder than 1900 ones, so taste a sliver of the soaked fish raw before baking and shorten the soak next time if it has gone bland.
- The thickeningThe flour-and-butter paste stirred in at fifteen minutes is a beurre manié. Work it completely smooth and stir it into the hot milk in small pieces, or it will sit in the pan as lumps in the last five minutes of baking.
- No added saltThe recipe calls only for pepper, and deliberately. The fish will season the milk sauce on its own.
- Pan size"Not too large for the fish" is practical advice: in a wide pan the pint of milk spreads thin, scorches, and never reduces into a sauce. Use a dish the fish just fits.
- YieldOne good-sized mackerel with its sauce serves two, or three at a breakfast table with eggs and toast alongside.
Salt mackerel was one of the cheap staple proteins of the nineteenth-century North Atlantic household, alongside salt cod and salt herring, and it turns up in American cookbooks as a breakfast dish as well as a dinner one — a legacy of the era when breakfast was the substantial meal before a day's work. The New England fishery salted mackerel in barrels by the hundred thousand, graded by size and fat content, and it travelled inland by rail to households that would never see a fresh one. One treatment was to bake the soaked fish in milk, and the Butterick Cook Book — published for a readership of home sewers and middle-class housekeepers — closes the recipe by calling it "palatable."