Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Broiled Mackerel
Broiled Mackerel
Draw and wash the mackerel, cut off their heads, rub over with salt and leave for an hour. Rub a gridiron with olive oil, lay the mackerel on it and broil over a charcoal fire. Place some chopped parsley and onions on a hot dish, and when the fish is cooked, squeeze over lemon juice and serve it while it is hot.
Broiled Mackerel, Normandy Sauce Clean and marinade some mackerel in oil, a slice of onion and a few sprigs of parsley. The roes must not be take out. Fill them up with as much maitre d'hotel butter as they will hold, wrap them around with sheets of oiled paper, securing the ends with thread, place them on a gridiron over a clear fire which must be a slow one, broil for forty minutes. When they are done remove the paper, place the fish on a dish, mask them with Normandy sauce and serve with fried bread for garnish.
Two related preparations: a plain salted-and-grilled mackerel, and a stuffed version wrapped in paper and served under a rich white sauce. Both assume a whole fish and a charcoal fire.
- The forty minutes is the problemA whole mackerel of ordinary size (about 1 to 1 1/2 lb) is cooked through in 15 to 20 minutes over moderate heat, turned once. Forty minutes reflects a deliberately slow charcoal fire and the insulating paper wrapper; taken literally it dries the flesh to cotton. Cook until the flesh at the backbone is opaque and pulls from the bone.
- Buy it the day you cook itMackerel is an oily, fast-spoiling fish and was one of the few things allowed to be cried and sold on Sundays in old London because it would not keep. Look for firm flesh, clear eyes and no ammoniac smell. Old mackerel also develops histamine, which cooking does not destroy.
- The hour in saltRubbing with salt and resting an hour is a dry brine; it firms the flesh and draws surface moisture so the skin browns rather than steams. An hour is ample for a whole fish, and rinse and pat dry before oiling or the skin turns leathery.
- Gridiron and charcoalA gridiron is a hinged or flat grill grate set over coals. A modern grill grate works, brushed with oil and preheated hot before the fish goes on, or use a fish basket -- mackerel skin sticks and the fish breaks when turned. A "clear fire, slow" means well-burnt-down coals with no flame, roughly medium indirect heat.
- Splitting the fishTo fill a mackerel with butter you must open it along the belly or bone it from the back, leaving the roe in place. Ask a fishmonger to butterfly it if you would rather not; the recipe is explicit that the roes stay in, and hard roe (the female's eggs) is firmer than soft roe (the male's milt).
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter beaten with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Chill it firm before stuffing, or it runs out before the fish sets.
- Oiled paperKitchen parchment brushed with oil, tied with cotton string, gives the same result -- a papillote that traps the butter and steam. Do not use waxed paper over a fire.
- Normandy sauceIn classical usage this is a fish veloute finished with mushroom and oyster liquor, egg yolks and cream, then butter -- sauce normande, not anything to do with apples or cider. It must not boil once the yolks go in.
- YieldOne mackerel per person. The stuffed version wants no more than fried bread alongside; the plain one is finished simply, with the parsley and raw chopped onion warming on the hot platter under the fish.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at a moment when French sauce work was applied to everything, including a cheap, oily fish that had long been the food of the poor in both England and the American Northeast. The plain broiled mackerel with parsley, onion and lemon is essentially a fisherman's dish; the second version -- roes left in, maître d'hôtel butter inside, paper wrapping, sauce normande over the top -- is the same fish dressed for a hotel dining room. Sauce normande is one of the small compound sauces of the classical repertoire, built on fish velouté and enriched with the cooking liquor of mushrooms and oysters, and its name is generally traced to the Norman coast's shellfish rather than to any single recipe. Cooking in oiled paper, en papillote, is often said to have suited delicate or oily fish in the days before foil existed, and mackerel roe appears to have been valued enough in the period to be treated as something of a delicacy in its own right.