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Baked Mackerel
Clean some mackerel, wash in plenty of water, split them open down the back, cut them across, making four pieces of each fish, and lay them in a pie dish in layers, placing between each layer a few bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns, and a few sliced shallots. Mix this with half a pint of stock free from fat, and a wineglassful each of white wine and vinegar, half a wineglassful each of anchovy and Harvey sauce and mushroom catsup, and a third of a tablespoonful each of Worcestershire sauce and soy. Pour this mixture over the fish, put in a flat dish and bake in a moderate oven. When it is cooked lay the fish on a hot dish, strain the sauce through a fine sieve over them, and leave until quite cold. When they are ready to serve arrange a few springs of parsley around the dish.
This is a soused mackerel — baked in a spiced vinegar-and-wine liquor, then left to cool in its own strained sauce. It is a cold dish, and the chilling is part of the cooking, not an afterthought.
- Read it as a cold dishThe instruction "leave until quite cold" is the hinge. The acid liquor firms the flesh and the flavour only settles after several hours; served hot it tastes thin and raw-edged. Chill it covered overnight and bring it back to cool room temperature before serving.
- Moderate oven350F. Split, quartered mackerel in liquor will be done in 25 to 30 minutes — the flesh should just part from the bone. Oily fish held longer than that in a hot dish goes dry and cottony even sitting in liquid.
- Wineglassful and gill measuresWineglassful measures -- A wineglassful in kitchen writing of this period is about 2 fl oz, so a wineglass each of white wine and vinegar is 1/4 cup each, and half a wineglass of anchovy sauce, Harvey sauce and mushroom catsup is about 1 fl oz, or 2 tablespoons, each. Half a pint of stock is 1 cup. A third of a tablespoonful is near enough a teaspoon.
- Harvey sauceA commercial English bottled sauce, anchovy-based with soy, garlic, vinegar and cayenne, widely sold through the nineteenth century and effectively gone now. Worcestershire is its closest surviving relative; if you want to approximate the original weight of flavour, add a little extra anchovy and a scrape of garlic rather than hunting for a substitute bottle.
- Mushroom catsup and soyMushroom catsup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract — not tomato ketchup, and not interchangeable with it. "Soy" here means soy sauce, then still an imported specialty item in American kitchens. Both are salty, so do not season the fish before tasting the strained sauce.
- The two dishesThe text says pie dish and then flat dish; use one shallow baking dish that holds the fish in two layers with the liquor coming most of the way up. A deep narrow dish steams the top layer and leaves the bottom overcooked.
- Buying the fishMackerel spoils faster than almost anything else at the counter and the acid in this liquor will not correct a tired fish. Buy it stiff, bright-eyed and smelling of nothing but sea, keep it cold on the way home, and cook it the same day.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many fish to use; each mackerel is cut into four pieces, so scale the liquor to the quantity you buy. Allow one fish per person as a main course, half as a first course with bread and butter. It keeps three days refrigerated in its sauce.
Souse — fish baked or simmered in a spiced vinegar liquor and left to cool in it — is one of the oldest ways of stretching an oily, quick-spoiling fish, and mackerel is the classic subject for it in both British and American cookery. The vinegar and wine do double duty, cutting the richness and slowing spoilage in an era when ice was expensive and not universal. Striking here is the shelf of bottled sauces called for at once: anchovy, Harvey, mushroom catsup, Worcestershire and soy. Such proprietary sauces were a ready route to depth of flavour in the late nineteenth century, in domestic as well as professional kitchens. The dish also fits the period's cold buffet, where soused fish sat alongside galantines and aspics and could be made a day ahead — an operational virtue in a hotel serving hundreds.