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Fresh Mackerel, Fennel Sauce
Cut the head and fins off a very fresh three-pound mackerel, split in two through back and remove spinal bone. Place it in sautoire with enough cold water to cover and two tablespoons fennel, let come to a boil, then shift near corner of range and let simmer for twelve minutes. Remove fish, drain well, dress on a dish, pour a fennel sauce over and serve.
A plain court-bouillon poaching of a whole split mackerel, written for a coal range and a cook who already knew what fennel sauce was. Two details need filling in: the pan and the sauce.
- SautoireA wide, straight-sided shallow pan — a modern sauté pan or a deep skillet. The point is that the fish lies flat in a single layer and the water only just covers it, so the flesh is not waterlogged.
- "Shift near corner of range"On a wood or coal range the corner was the cooler spot, away from the firebox. The instruction is to bring the pan down off the boil to the gentle simmer the recipe calls for; no temperature is given in the original. A rolling boil will shred a split mackerel.
- Twelve minutesReasonable for a 3 lb fish opened flat, but start checking at eight. It is done when the flesh at the thickest part separates cleanly from the bone and reads about 145F. Mackerel is oily and forgiving, but not indefinitely.
- The two tablespoons of fennelGenuinely ambiguous in the original. It most likely means chopped fresh fennel fronds thrown into the poaching water; fennel seed, about a teaspoon crushed, gives a stronger and more aniseed result. Either reading works, but they are not the same dish.
- Season the waterThe recipe seasons nothing. Poaching liquid for oily fish wants salt (roughly a tablespoon per quart), a splash of vinegar or white wine, and a few peppercorns, or the fish comes out flat.
- The fennel sauceNot written out here; the recipe assumes the reader can make it. The standard form is a butter-and-flour white sauce, thinned with some of the poaching liquid or milk, finished with a good handful of blanched, finely chopped fennel fronds off the heat. Add the fennel at the end — long cooking dulls the anise.
- Buying the fish"Very fresh" is not decorative. Mackerel is among the fastest-spoiling fish sold and is a scombroid species, meaning poor handling produces histamine that cooking will not destroy. Buy it firm, bright-eyed and smelling of nothing much, and cook it the day you get it.
- YieldA 3 lb mackerel, filleted off the bone at the table, serves three to four. Boiled potatoes and the sauce are the traditional accompaniment.
Mackerel with fennel is a long-established pairing in English and northern French cooking — fennel's anise sweetness cuts the oil of the fish, the same logic that puts gooseberry sauce alongside it in older British books. It survived into the great hotel kitchens of the nineteenth century as a standard, unremarkable dish. Its appearance in a book organised around "The World's Kitchen" says something about how such collections worked: this is not exotic, it is the sort of thing a professional cook was expected to be able to turn out from a two-line note, with the sauce assumed rather than written down. The instruction to move the pan to the corner of the range is a small fossil of the coal-fired kitchen, where heat was controlled by position rather than by a dial.