Home › The World's Kitchen › Marinaded Fresh Mackerel
Marinaded Fresh Mackerel
Cut head off and remove fins of a three-pound fresh mackerel. Split in two through back, remove spinal bone and thoroughly wipe. Place in a sautoire, with enough water to cover, two tablespoons vinegar, one teaspoon salt, and boil fifteen minutes. Remove, place fish in a deep dish and cover with vinegar, adding half teaspoon salt, a branch tarragon, a sprig thyme, a sprig bay leaf, two cloves, teaspoon whole black pepper and one sliced onion, then let the mackerel infuse ten hours. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with parsley greens and serve with a fennel sauce separately.
A cooked-then-pickled mackerel in the escabeche family, served cold. Two things in the original need rethinking: the boiling time and the ten hours at room temperature.
- Cut the cooking timeFifteen minutes at a boil turns split mackerel dry and shreddy. Bring the acidulated water to a bare simmer and poach the halves 6 to 8 minutes, until the flesh just parts at the backbone line, then lift them out with a wide spatula.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan, not a deep pot. Any wide skillet or sauté pan that holds the two halves flat in a single layer will do; crowding them into something narrow breaks the fish.
- Marinate coldMackerel is the classic scombroid fish, and its flesh builds histamine quickly when held warm — histamine that cooking and pickling will not destroy. Do the ten-hour infusion covered in the refrigerator, and start with fish that has been kept properly iced.
- How much vinegarThe recipe says only "cover." For a 3-lb fish split in two you will need roughly 2 to 3 cups. Ordinary cider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent acidity works well; distilled white gives a sharper, flatter result.
- A sprig of bayMeans one bay leaf. "Branch tarragon" is a stem with its leaves, about a tablespoon chopped equivalent; the herbs are meant to be lifted out or left as garnish, not eaten.
- Fennel sauceClassically a white or butter sauce finished with chopped fennel leaf, served in a sauceboat. A cold fennel-and-lemon mayonnaise suits the chilled fish better than a hot sauce.
- The folded napkinStandard restaurant plating of the period: a cloth napkin folded on the platter to absorb marinade and keep the fish from sliding. A rack or a bed of frisee does the same work now.
- YieldA 3-lb mackerel, boned and split, serves four as a cold first course or two as a main. Serve it cold or barely cool, never warmed through again.
Marinaded fish of this kind is the northern European relative of Spanish escabeche and Italian in carpione — fish cooked, then steeped in vinegar and aromatics, a treatment generally traced to the medieval Mediterranean practice of preserving fried fish in acid. It suited mackerel particularly well: an oily, fast-spoiling fish landed in enormous quantities on both sides of the Atlantic. Because it spoiled so quickly, London street sellers were exempted from Sunday trading restrictions and allowed to cry mackerel. In a book like this one, compiled out of a professional hotel and restaurant kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, the dish belongs to the cold buffet — made a day ahead, dressed on a napkin, and sent out with a sauceboat alongside, which is exactly the sort of preparation a large kitchen wanted: finished in advance, improved by waiting, and requiring nothing at the moment of service.