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Spanish Mackerel, Bordelaise
Cut the fins, tail and head off a fine, fresh, three-pound Spanish mackerel, split in two through the back, remove spinal bone, season with light teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Arrange fish in a lightly buttered baking dish, cut side downward, sprinkle with six finely chopped shallots and squeeze over juice of half a lemon. Baste with a half ounce very hot melted butter, set in oven for fifteen minutes, then bring it to oven door. Reduce two gills tomato sauce in a saucepan to half the quantity, then pour it over mackerel, reset in oven for fifteen minutes more, remove and send to table in same dish.
A plain hotel-kitchen fish course that depends on two things: a genuinely fresh fish and a tomato sauce cooked down until it clings rather than floods the dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book leaves it to the range cook's judgment. A hot oven is implied by the short two-stage timing (fifteen minutes, then fifteen more); something in the region of 400F is a reasonable modern equivalent, but the figure is not in the text.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup, reduced to half a cup before it goes over the fish. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper half a teaspoon.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. It is a basting film, not a poaching medium; the melted butter must be genuinely hot when it goes on so it spreads rather than sets.
- The shallotsShallot sizes vary widely, and six large modern shallots would bury a three-pound fish; scale the quantity to the size of what you have. The recipe gives only the count, not a volume.
- Reduce the sauce firstThe instruction to reduce before pouring is the hinge. Thin tomato sauce added to a fish already releasing juices produces a watery dish and steams the surface instead of glazing it.
- DonenessThirty minutes is generous for a three-pound split mackerel by current practice; check at twenty-two to twenty-five minutes and look for flesh that is just opaque. Note that official guidance for fish is 145F at the thickest point; the lower 130-135F often quoted for oily fish is a kitchen preference rather than a safety figure.
- Sourcing the fishSpanish mackerel is an oily fish that goes off quickly and was a coastal luxury when this book was written. Any firm, fresh, oily fish of similar size behaves the same way here; ask for it split and pin-boned.
- YieldA three-pound whole fish, headed and boned, serves four as a main course.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) was written out of a long career in New York restaurant kitchens, and its French-titled fish courses reflect the professional shorthand of that world rather than strict classical doctrine. A true sauce bordelaise, named for Bordeaux, is generally described as a red wine reduction with shallots and beef marrow, though "a la bordelaise" covered a range of preparations in practice. Spanish mackerel, meanwhile, was one of the prestige fish of the American Atlantic coast in this period, prized above the common mackerel for its firmer, sweeter flesh and priced accordingly on hotel menus, and a book aimed at the professional and the ambitious household gives it a French treatment rather than the plain broiling most mackerel received.