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Boiled Salt Mackerel in Milk
Soak a good-sized salt mackerel in fresh water over night. Drain on a cloth and place in a sautoire with three-quarters of a pint milk and a saltspoon cayenne pepper, and gently boil for fifteen minutes. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve.
A plain salt-fish supper that depends almost entirely on two things: a thorough soak and milk that never actually boils. The instructions are terse because in 1900 every cook knew both.
- The hinge: do not boil the milkDespite the title, milk at a rolling boil will curdle, scorch on the bottom of the pan, and toughen the fish. Hold it at a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling.
- Soak it properlyOvernight in cold water is right, but change the water two or three times, and keep it refrigerated rather than on the counter. Salt mackerel varies enormously in cure strength; poach a small flake and taste before committing the whole fish.
- SautoireA shallow, straight-sided pan — what a modern kitchen calls a sauté pan or a deep skillet. It wants to be wide enough to hold the fish flat in a single layer.
- Three-quarters of a pintAbout 1 1/2 cups if the book means a US pint, closer to 1 3/4 cups on the British measure. Either way the aim is milk shallow enough to half-submerge the fish, so judge by the pan.
- A saltspoon of cayenneA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. That is assertive with a whole cayenne this hot; an eighth of a teaspoon suits most palates, and the pepper is the only seasoning here, so the salt in the fish does the rest.
- Fifteen minutes is longA split mackerel of a pound or so is done in 8 to 10 minutes at a simmer, when the flesh separates cleanly at the backbone. Fifteen minutes suits a thick, heavily cured fish and will leave a thinner one dry.
- The folded napkinA serving convention of the period rather than decoration; the cloth would also have absorbed any poaching milk carried over to the platter. A warmed plate and a slotted spatula do the same job.
- What to do with the milkFilippini says nothing about the poaching liquid. It has taken up salt and fish flavour and can be whisked with a small knob of butter worked with flour and reduced to a thin cream sauce.
- YieldOne good-sized mackerel feeds two as a main course, three or four at breakfast with potatoes.
Salt mackerel was one of the cheapest preserved proteins in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, barrelled by the hundredweight in Nova Scotia, Maine and Massachusetts and sold from open casks in grocery stores well into the twentieth century. Poaching it in milk after a long soak served a practical purpose: the fresh water pulled out the brine and the milk softened what remained, which is why versions of this dish turn up in American cookbooks as a breakfast item alongside creamed codfish and finnan haddie. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, gives it here in a notably plain treatment — no sauce, no garnish beyond parsley, and a folded napkin on the platter in the service style of the period.