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Boiled Salt Mackerel
After freshening wrap in a cloth and simmer for fifteen minutes; it will be almost done as soon as the water reaches the boiling point; remove, lay on it two hard-boiled eggs sliced, pour over it drawn butter, and trim with parsley leaves. Boiling salt-fish hardens it.
A short set of instructions that assumes two things the modern cook may not know: how to freshen salt fish, and what "drawn butter" meant in an American kitchen of the 1880s.
- Never let it boilThe closing line is the hinge of the recipe. Salt fish proteins tighten and go stringy in rolling water; hold the pot at a bare shiver, where the surface only trembles rather than breaks. The fish is done when the flesh parts from the backbone.
- "Freshening" the fishSalt mackerel comes packed in dry salt or brine and must be soaked before cooking. The usual method is cold water, skin side up in a wide dish so the salt sinks away from the flesh, for eight to twelve hours with two or three changes of water. Taste a shred of the raw flesh before you commit; under-soaked mackerel is inedible and over-soaked is flabby.
- Drawn butter is a sauce, not clarified butterIn nineteenth-century American books drawn butter means a light flour-thickened butter sauce: roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, a cup of hot water or fish broth whisked in, then more butter beaten in off the heat. Where modern British and French usage takes "drawn butter" to mean clarified butter, that is a different sense of the phrase.
- The clothWrapping in a floured cloth or a double layer of cheesecloth keeps a soft fillet from breaking up and gives you something to lift by. A perforated poaching insert or a wide skimmer does the same job.
- TimingFifteen minutes is generous for a modern split fillet, which is thinner than the whole salted fish of the period. Reckon eight to ten minutes at a simmer for a half-inch fillet, and take the recipe at its word that it will be nearly done the moment the water is hot.
- SourcingSalt mackerel is still sold in Caribbean, Portuguese, Polish and East Asian groceries, usually as split brined fillets in tubs. These are often less salty than the dry-salted barrel fish this book had in mind, so you may be able to shorten the soaking considerably — taste as you go.
- Yield and servingOne good fillet, roughly three-quarters of a pound before soaking, will serve two. It was chiefly a breakfast dish, and salt fish of this kind also suited fast days and Lent; boiled or baked potatoes and the sliced hard-boiled egg make the whole plate.
Salt mackerel was one of the staple preserved fish of the nineteenth-century American pantry, alongside salt cod and pickled herring, sold by the barrel and graded by number according to size and fatness. It kept without ice, travelled inland cheaply, and appeared on breakfast tables well beyond New England, which is why a book compiled for Southern households includes it without ceremony. The pairing with sliced hard-boiled egg and a flour-thickened butter sauce is a standard Anglo-American treatment of boiled fish of the period; the egg supplies richness that long soaking in water draws out. That the compiler bothered to end with a warning about boiling suggests the mistake was common enough to be worth the line. The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the large family of late-century compiled household manuals that recycled and adapted recipes across regions, which is how a North Atlantic fish ends up filed under Southern cookery.