No. 1192

Fresh Mackerel in Papers, Mephisto

Maquereau Frais en Papillotes, Mephisto

Split the mackerel lengthwise in two; suppress the middle bone, pare, season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, then coat the surface with oil and broil over a slow fire (the milts and roe to be cooked apart in the oven). Cut some sheets of paper into long hearts, oil them over and lay on one of their sides a little deviled sauce (No. 459), on top range the fish with either the milts or roe and cover over with more of the sauce; fold the paper over and twist it well around so as to enclose the fish hermetically; range them on the same dish intended for the table, pour over a little oil and lay them in a hot oven. When the paper has swollen and is a fine color, place the dish on top of another and serve.

← No. 1191 Fresh Mackerel, Bonnefoy—Fillets Shad, Herring & Mackerel No. 1193 Fresh Mackerel, Maitre d'Hotel →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a cook who already knows how to bone a fish and has a deviled sauce standing by. The technique itself is straightforward; the vocabulary is what dates it.

"Suppress the middle bone"This means remove it. Split the mackerel lengthwise, lift out the spine and pin bones; Ranhofer's wording ("in two") suggests two sides rather than a single hinged piece. Pare simply means to trim the belly flaps and fins tidy.
Milts and roeMilt is the soft male roe, sold as soft roe where it is sold at all; hard roe is the egg sac. Most fishmongers now gut mackerel before sale, so expect to leave these out. The dish loses nothing essential without them.
The paperNineteenth-century kitchens used plain kitchen paper heavily brushed with oil. Baking parchment does the same job with less fuss; foil seals more reliably but will not swell and brown, which is the point of the presentation.
"Broil over a slow fire"The initial cooking is a moderate grill, not a hard sear — enough to set the flesh and take colour, roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side for a fillet. The oven stage finishes it. Mackerel is oily and forgiving, but it turns dry and cottony if fully cooked twice.
A hot ovenRanhofer gives no figure; somewhere around 425F is a reasonable modern reading. The papers need enough heat to inflate quickly and colour; a moderate oven simply dries the fish. Eight to ten minutes is usually enough for the parcel to puff and brown.
Deviled sauceRanhofer's No. 459 is a sauce a la diable: a wine-and-shallot reduction finished with espagnole and sharply seasoned with cayenne (check the original entry for the exact seasonings rather than assuming mustard). A sharp mustard-and-cayenne sauce built on a good brown stock will serve the same purpose; it must be thick enough not to run out of the paper.
NutmegGrated nutmeg on fish reads oddly now, but it appears often enough alongside salt and pepper in French kitchens of the period to be unremarkable. A very small grating is all that is intended.
ServingThe parcels go into the oven on the dish they will be carried to table on; setting that dish on a second one at the moment of service was normal practice for a hot dish, presumably to protect the table. Cut the papers open in front of the diners -- the aroma is the reason for the method.

A Little History

En papillote — cooking sealed in oiled paper so the fish steams in its own juices and the sauce — was a standing technique in French professional kitchens long before Charles Ranhofer set it down in The Epicurean (1894), his enormous record of thirty-odd years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York. The Mephisto in the title belongs to the same family of devil-names as the diable in the sauce, a naming habit that also gave us devilled kidneys and devilled ham. Mackerel suits the treatment particularly well. It is oily, strongly flavoured and spoils faster than almost any fish at market, which is why it was cheap and why it was so often paired with something acid and sharp.