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Boiled Mackerel
Prepare and clean some mackerel, put them in salted water, and boil until they are done. When they are cooked, drain the mackerel and put them on a hot dish. Blanch some fennel in salted water, and when it is soft drain and chop it finely; put one tablespoonful in half a pint of butter sauce, and serve in a sauceboat with the fish.
A plain poached fish with fennel butter sauce, written for a cook who already knows the house sauces. Two things need translating: the word "boil," and what "fennel" meant in a 1900 hotel kitchen.
- Do not actually boil itMackerel is soft-fleshed and falls apart in agitated water. Bring the salted water to a boil, slide the fish in, then drop the heat so the surface barely trembles and hold it there.
- TimingA whole mackerel of about a pound takes 8-12 minutes at a bare simmer; fillets take 4-6. It is done when the flesh at the thickest point behind the head parts from the backbone and reads 130-135F.
- Salted waterThe original gives no proportion. About 1 tablespoon of salt per quart is enough to season the flesh without curing it; heavier brines will firm and dry the fish.
- Half a pintOne cup of butter sauce. One tablespoon of chopped fennel in a full cup is a light seasoning by modern taste, and more can be added to taste.
- Which fennelMost likely the feathery green herb fennel or its tender stalks rather than the Florence fennel bulb sold today as a vegetable, though the instruction to blanch until soft would suit either. Bulb fennel works if you use only the fronds and the pale inner layers, sliced thin before blanching.
- Butter sauceThe period's plain white sauce enriched with butter, closer to a thin béchamel than to hollandaise.
- Hot dishWarm the serving platter genuinely hot. Poached fish sheds water and cools fast, and a cold plate turns the drained mackerel tepid before it reaches the table.
- FreshnessMackerel is oily and goes rancid faster than white fish. Buy it with clear eyes and firm flesh and cook it the day you get it; older mackerel poaches into something flat and metallic that no sauce will fix.
Mackerel was one of the cheapest and most abundant fish on the American Atlantic coast in Oscar Tschirky's day, landed in enormous quantities off New England and salted by the barrel for inland trade, which is why fresh mackerel carried a slight air of the ordinary in a hotel dining room. Pairing it with fennel is much older than the Waldorf: the herb's anise note has been used against oily fish around the Mediterranean for centuries, and English and French cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries routinely give fennel sauce as the standard accompaniment to mackerel and salmon. What marks this as a professional kitchen's writing is the shorthand — "half a pint of butter sauce" assumes a cook with a saucepan of it already standing, in a kitchen where base sauces would generally have been kept ready and individual dishes finished from them to order.