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Baked Fresh Mackerel, Creole
Prepare and keep hot a Creole sauce. Cut the head off and neatly trim a three-pound fresh mackerel, split in two through back, remove spinal bone, place on a lightly buttered tin, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika; glaze surface of mackerel with a little melted butter, then set in oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove, arrange in a baking dish, pour the Creole sauce over, sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese on top, and set in oven for fifteen minutes more. Remove, decorate all around with half a lemon finely sliced and a little parsley greens and serve.
A straightforward two-stage bake: the fish is set first on its own, then finished under sauce. The main risk is that the total 30 minutes of oven time, written for a whole butterflied fish in a coal range, will dry out a modern fillet.
- The Creole sauce comes firstThe recipe assumes you have already made the book's Creole sauce and are keeping it hot. Creole sauces of this kind are generally built on onion, sweet pepper and tomato with a little cayenne; check the book's own sauce recipe for its exact formula. Make it before the fish goes anywhere near the oven.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as none could be. A moderately hot oven, 400F, suits both stages; the first bake sets the flesh, the second heats the sauce through and colours the cheese.
- Watch the total timeThirty minutes is a great deal for a split three-pound mackerel and far too much for supermarket fillets. Judge by the fish, not the clock: it is done when the thickest part flakes and reads 145F. Cut the first bake short if the fillets are thin, since they will get a second fifteen minutes under the sauce.
- Preparing the fishSplitting through the back and lifting out the spine gives you a butterflied fish that lies flat, skin down. Any fishmonger will do this; ask for it kite-cut or butterflied, and have the pin bones pulled.
- "A lightly buttered tin"A rimmed sheet pan. The move to a separate baking dish for the second stage presumably keeps the sauce pooled around the fish rather than running off the flat tin, and lets the dish go to the table.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt on three pounds of fish is about right, but salt the flesh side rather than the skin, and remember the Creole sauce is seasoned as well. The recipe does not say which paprika; a sweet one, used as much for colour as heat, suits the dish.
- Parmesan on fishNot a mistake and not unusual in hotel cooking of this period, where grated cheese was a standard gratin finish. Use a light dusting; mackerel is assertive enough without a heavy cheese crust.
- YieldA three-pound mackerel serves three to four as a main course. Substituting two one-pound fish, or four fillets, works, with the timings shortened accordingly.
Baked fish under a tomato-and-pepper Creole sauce, finished with grated cheese, is restaurant cooking rather than home cooking: the recipe presumes a sauce already made and held hot on the stove, which is how a professional kitchen works. That is characteristic of The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York and wrote for readers who wanted hotel dishes reproduced at home. The "Creole" label in American cookbooks of this era had already loosened from New Orleans to mean, more or less, anything sauced with tomato, onion, sweet pepper and a little cayenne. Mackerel was an obvious candidate for that treatment: cheap, abundant along the Atlantic coast, oily enough to stand up to an acidic sauce, and strong enough in flavour to take a assertive sauce.