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Broiled Salt Mackerel
Let soak in cold water 12 hours, skin side up. Drain and wipe dry. Brush over with melted fat. Broil on a well-greased broiler skin side down, basting with butter once or twice. Remove carefully to serving dish and pour over½ cup of hot white sauce (page 29). Sprinkle with finely-chopped parsley.
A straightforward salt-fish preparation that depends almost entirely on the soak. The cooking is a matter of minutes; the desalting is the part that decides whether the dish is edible.
- Soak skin side up, and mean itThe fillet is laid flesh side down in the water; the usual explanation given for this is that salt drawn out of the flesh falls away rather than settling back into it. Change the water two or three times over the twelve hours, and keep the bowl in the refrigerator rather than on the counter.
- Judge the salt, not the clockTwelve hours suits a heavily salted split mackerel. Lightly cured or brine-packed fillets sold today may need only two to four hours. Taste a corner of the raw flesh: it should read as seasoned, not saline.
- "Broiler" means the rackIn this period the broiler is the hinged double wire grid or the greased rack set under a gas flame, not an oven set to a broil cycle. A modern rack about four inches below a preheated element does the same job.
- TimingA split mackerel takes roughly six to ten minutes; the recipe keeps it skin side down throughout and calls for no turning, only basting with butter once or twice. The flesh should just flake; mackerel is oily and forgiving but dries out past that.
- White sauceThe page 29 sauce is not reproduced here; a standard thin white sauce of this period runs about a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, then a cup of milk, seasoned. Half a cup is the portion poured over the fish. Do not salt it before tasting, since the fish carries plenty.
- Basting fat"Melted fat" would likely have been whatever drippings, lard or butter the house had. Butter for the basting is worth it; mackerel's own oil plus butter gives plenty of richness.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield and does not state how much fish is meant. A split salt mackerel of the usual size would serve about two, or perhaps three at breakfast alongside potatoes. Scale the sauce accordingly.
Salt mackerel was one of the cheapest animal proteins in the American Northeast well into the twentieth century: caught in enormous numbers off New England and the Maritimes, split, salted and barreled, it kept without ice and traveled inland by rail. Broiled and served with a milk sauce, it is often said to have been a breakfast and supper dish rather than a dinner one, and cookbooks of the period seem largely to take for granted that a reader would know what a barrel or a wooden box of salt mackerel looks like. Its presence here reflects the purpose of the book itself: the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed cookery and household pamphlets free to policyholders as part of a broader public-health and thrift campaign, and the recipes lean hard toward inexpensive, keepable, nourishing food. The technique long predates the book — soaking, then applying dry heat — and is the same one applied to salt cod, salt herring and salt pork throughout the period.