Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Potted Mackerel
Potted Mackerel
Clean the mackerel well, dry it, season to taste with pepper and salt, place it in a baking-dish with mixed spice, a couple of bay leaves and a little butter; bake it in the oven, and when sufficiently done take it out and allow it to cool, Then bone and lay the meat in pots, and pour over enough melted butter to cover.
A very compressed set of directions in the English potting tradition, written for a kitchen that assumed cooks already knew the method. Two things carry the dish: clarified butter, and the understanding that the butter seal is a texture and flavour device, not a substitute for refrigeration.
- Butter must be clarifiedClarify the butter -- Melted whole butter carries milk solids and water, which sour faster than clear fat and shorten the pot's life. Clarify the butter, let it settle, and pour off only the clear fat so it sets as a firm, opaque seal.
- Oven and timingThe original gives no oven heat or time at all. A modern equivalent would be a moderate oven, around 350F: whole mackerel of 1 to 1 1/2 lb takes 20 to 25 minutes, or 12 to 15 minutes for fillets; the flesh should just release from the backbone, since overcooked mackerel turns dry and cottony once it is cold and packed.
- "Mixed spice"The English baking blend of the period: allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, mace or cloves, sometimes coriander and ginger. A scant 1/2 teaspoon for a pound of fish is plenty, as it should sit behind the mackerel rather than in front of it.
- Season for cold eatingCold fat mutes salt and pepper considerably. Season the fish before baking, then taste and correct the boned flesh again before it goes into the pots, adding a little more salt and pepper than seems right while warm.
- Packing the potsBone carefully, taking out the fine pin bones as well as the frame, and press the flakes down firmly into small ramekins or jars to drive out air pockets. Pour the butter over while the fish is cool but the butter is only just liquid, and cover the surface completely.
- Storage, which the original omitsA nineteenth-century cook relied on a cold larder and a short life for this. Refrigerate the pots as soon as the butter sets and eat within three days; do not treat a butter-sealed pot of cooked oily fish as shelf-stable at room temperature.
- Yield and servingTwo mackerel will fill roughly three small ramekins, depending on their size. Serve cold or barely cool with dry toast and lemon, and leave the butter on the pot rather than scraping it off.
Potting is an English preserving technique older than the Waldorf by two centuries: cooked meat or fish packed tight into an earthenware pot and sealed under a layer of clarified fat that keeps air off the surface. Mackerel was an obvious candidate because it is oily and spoils fast, so coastal and market cooks had every reason to turn a glut into something that would hold a few days and travel to table cold. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is full of these plain English larder recipes sitting alongside the hotel's grand service dishes, which suggests, though the record is thin, that the Waldorf kitchen may have fed staff and buffets as well as banquets, and that potted fish plausibly still had a place on the cold sideboard and at breakfast in American hotels of the 1890s.