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Fresh Mackerel, Italienne
Prepare and keep hot an Italienne sauce. Cut off the head, neatly trim and wipe a nice, fat, fresh mackerel of three pounds. Split it in two through the back, remove the spinal bone, and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Place it in a lightly buttered tin, skin side downward, place a few little bits of butter on top of the fish, then set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, place in a baking dish, pour the Italienne sauce and sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over; set in the oven again for fifteen minutes, remove, decorate the dish all around with thin half slices lemon and serve.
A straightforward gratin of split baked mackerel under a mushroom-and-tomato Italienne sauce. The original assumes you have the sauce already made and gives no oven temperature at all.
- Italienne sauceIn the classical repertoire this is a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots cooked down in oil or butter, moistened with white wine, then bound with demi-glace and tomato and finished with chopped parsley, chervil and tarragon. Filippini's book carries its own sauce entry; any standard version works, and it should be thick enough to coat the fish rather than pool around it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. A moderate oven, 350-375F, suits both stages.
- The two bakes add upTwenty minutes plus fifteen is a long time for a split fish. A 3 lb mackerel opened flat is only an inch or so thick and will be done in 15-18 minutes total. Give it about 12 minutes plain, then sauce, cheese and 5-6 minutes more, or finish under the broiler until the top colors.
- Splitting through the backCutting along the backbone from the dorsal side and lifting out the spine leaves the belly skin intact so the fish opens flat as one piece, skin down. A fishmonger will do this if asked to kite it, or to butterfly it through the back.
- FreshnessMackerel is oily and deteriorates faster than white fish; the flesh should be firm and the eye clear with no sourness on the gills. Anything with a rancid or ammoniac smell should be rejected outright, as scombroid histamine develops in poorly chilled mackerel and is not destroyed by cooking.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt on a 3 lb fish is reasonable, but the Italienne sauce and Parmesan both carry salt. Season the fish lightly and correct the sauce at the end.
- YieldA 3 lb mackerel, once headed and boned, serves four generously as a main course.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in 1906 as a survey of national dishes as they were then cooked in professional American kitchens, which is why a homely fish like mackerel arrives dressed in a French sauce and labeled Italian. Sauce italienne belongs to the nineteenth-century French brown-sauce system rather than to Italy: its Italian character rests on the tomato and the mushroom duxelles, and by the time Escoffier codified it the name is often said to have become largely conventional. Mackerel itself was among the cheapest fish on the Atlantic coast, landed in enormous quantities, and its oiliness made it notorious for spoiling quickly; treating it with a demi-glace sauce and grated Parmesan was a way of lifting a common fish onto a restaurant menu.