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Boiled Salt Mackerel
Cut away the fins and soak in fresh water for two hours a fine, good-sized salt mackerel. Drain well and then plunge it into a pan with two quarts boiling water and allow to boil for ten minutes. Remove, drain well, dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve with a little hot melted butter separately.
A salt-cured mackerel needs two things from the cook: enough soaking to pull the salt back to a palatable level, and gentle heat so the fish holds together. The original is thin on the first and brisk on the second.
- Two hours is not enough soakingHard-salted split mackerel of the kind sold in barrels needs 8-12 hours in several changes of cold water, refrigerated, skin side up so salt sinks away from the flesh. Two hours suits only a lightly cured, refrigerated fillet. Taste a pared-off corner after poaching a scrap before committing the whole fish.
- Don't let it boilA rolling boil for ten minutes shreds the flesh and toughens it. Bring the water to a boil, slide the fish in, take the pan off the heat or drop it to the barest tremble, and hold for 8-10 minutes until the flesh parts at the backbone.
- A good-sized mackerelSalt mackerel were sold split and flat, and graded by size in the barrel, so a "good-sized" one might run a pound or more after curing -- two to three servings. Two quarts of water should be enough to cover one such fish in a wide pan; use a pan the fish lies flat in rather than a deep pot.
- The folded napkinNot decoration. A linen napkin folded on the hot platter absorbs the water that keeps weeping out of poached fish, so the butter is not diluted on the plate. A doubled kitchen towel does the same work.
- Melted butter, period senseIn cookbooks of this vintage "melted butter" often meant a thin flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain drawn butter. Either serves here; plain warm butter with lemon and chopped parsley suits the saltiness better than a floured sauce.
- Salt nothing elseEven well-soaked, the fish carries plenty. Season the butter lightly if at all, and keep the accompaniments bland -- boiled potatoes were the standard partner, and still are the right one.
Salt mackerel was a staple of the North Atlantic trade long before refrigeration reached domestic kitchens. Mackerel are oily and spoil fast, so the New England and Irish fisheries split, gutted and packed them in barrels of brine, graded by size and shipped inland by the ton; a barrel in the cellar was ordinary winter provisioning in nineteenth-century American and northern European households. Boiled and served with butter and potatoes, it was a common breakfast dish as much as a supper one, and recipes for it are usually as brief as this one. The folded napkin and the separately served butter place this version in the formal service style of the period.