No. 1199

Spanish Mackerel with Gooseberries—Stuffeed

Maquereau Espagnol Farci Garni de Groseilles Vertes

Split well-cleaned mackerel down the back; take out the bone just below the head and two inches above the tail; season the inside and fill the empty space with a fish forcemeat (No. 76), into which has been added some allemande sauce (No. 407), and a third of its quantity of cooked fine herbs, give the fish its original shape, roll it tightly in two sheets of paper and tie it at both ends, in the center and once again between these, making in all five rows of string; place the fish on a baking pan, set it in the oven for twenty to thirty minutes, remove, unwrap and dress, serving with a garnishing of gooseberries around the fish.

For a Gooseberry Garnishing take half a pound of gooseberries; suppress the stalks and ends, then blanch them for two minutes in boiling water in an untinned copper vessel or until they crush between the fingers, drain and then mix them in a thickened maitre d'hotel sauce (No. 493); pour over the fish and garnish.

← No. 1198 Spanish Mackerel with Crawfish—Fillets Shad, Herring & Mackerel No. 1200 Spanish Mackerel with Green Peas →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has forcemeat, allemande and maître d'hôtel sauce standing by, and assumes you can read an oven by feel. The two things worth getting right here are the paper wrapping and the copper.

Skip the unlined copperThe instruction to blanch gooseberries in an untinned copper vessel is a nineteenth-century trick for fixing a bright green colour: the acid in the fruit dissolves a trace of copper. Blanch them in stainless steel instead and accept a duller green; acidic fruit cooked in bare copper picks up enough metal to cause nausea and vomiting.
Oven temperatureRanhofer gives no temperature, only "the oven". For a paper-wrapped fish a moderate oven, somewhere in the region of 350-375F, is a reasonable modern reading; the parcel steams the fish rather than browning it, so a hotter oven only scorches the wrapping.
TimingTwenty to thirty minutes points to a whole boned Spanish mackerel of a few pounds stuffed with forcemeat, though Ranhofer specifies no weight. A smaller fish, or fillets, will be done sooner. The hinge is the forcemeat, not the fish: it needs to reach about 145F in the centre, and mackerel flesh dries fast past that point.
The paperTwo sheets of paper tied in five places is the same principle as cooking en papillote. Use parchment, buttered on the inside, and tie with butcher's twine; the point of the five ties is to hold the split fish back into its original round shape while the stuffing sets.
Fish forcemeat (No. 76)A cross-reference; the composition is in that recipe, not on this page. A modern food-processor mousseline of any lean white fish, seasoned and bound with one egg white and about half its weight in cream, does the same job. Ranhofer's addition of allemande sauce (No. 407, a velouté thickened with egg yolks and finished with lemon) is there for richness and can be replaced with a spoonful or two of thick béchamel.
Cooked fine herbsNot raw chopped herbs: fines herbes here means shallot and mushroom sweated in butter with parsley, chervil and tarragon, cooled before it goes into the forcemeat. Adding it raw wets the mousseline and it will not hold.
GooseberriesHalf a pound of hard green gooseberries, topped and tailed. They are sour and firm, quite unlike the ripe dessert sort; if unavailable, unripe cape gooseberries are not a substitute, but a sharp green plum or a rhubarb stalk cut small will give the same acid counterweight to oily fish.
Maître d'hôtel sauce, thickenedRanhofer's No. 493 is not the compound butter of the same name but a velouté finished with parsley, lemon and butter. A light fish velouté with lemon juice and chopped parsley will carry the fruit properly; plain melted herb butter will break under it.
YieldOne stuffed 2 to 3 lb fish serves four as a main course, or six in a longer menu of the kind this book was written for.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that house's repertoire, which is why every component here is a cross-reference to another number rather than a written-out method. The pairing itself is older and thoroughly Anglo-French: maquereau à la groseille, mackerel with a sharp green gooseberry sauce, appears in English and Norman cooking well before Delmonico's, and the logic is the same as apple with pork or verjuice with fatty meat, an acid to cut through an oily fish. The French name for the gooseberry, groseille à maquereau, literally the mackerel currant, is generally taken as evidence of how long the two have been eaten together. What this version adds to the plain grilled fish is the boning and stuffing, which turns it into a course that could be carved at table, and the untinned copper blanch, a standard professional dodge of the period for holding the colour of green fruit and vegetables that the trade abandoned once its effects were better understood.