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Baked Fillets of Mackerel
Select a large mackerel, clean, split and remove the backbone. Cut the fish in three-inch pieces, flatten them slightly, sprinkle them with lemon juice, salt and pepper; place in a buttered pan, cover with buttered paper and bake in a hot oven for ten minutes. Remove to a hot dish; pour round them the Indian sauce and garnish with toast points.
A straightforward fillet bake that depends on two things the original leaves unspoken: a genuinely hot oven and a sauce made in advance.
- Oven heat"A hot oven" in books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. The ten-minute timing assumes heat at that level; in a moderate oven the fish will take longer and is more likely to steam than to set.
- Buttered paperThe original means a sheet of buttered kitchen paper laid over the fish rather than a lid; it keeps the surface from drying while still letting the pan run hot.
- Indian sauceNineteenth-century menu French for a curry sauce: a velouté or béchamel seasoned with curry powder, sometimes finished with cream and lemon. It is a separate preparation and must be made and kept hot before the fish goes in the oven.
- Boning the fishSplitting and lifting the backbone leaves the fine pin bones behind. Run a finger down the fillet and pull them with tweezers before cutting into three-inch pieces.
- DonenessThick mackerel fillets from a large fish may need twelve minutes; thin tail pieces will be done in seven. Judge by the flesh turning opaque and just parting, not by the clock alone.
- BuyingA "large mackerel" here would be Atlantic mackerel; a couple of smaller fish, filleted, can be substituted. Mackerel is an oily fish that spoils fast; buy it the day you cook it and look for clear eyes and firm flesh.
- Toast pointsWhite bread, crusts off, toasted and cut corner to corner. Cut them just before serving or they go leathery.
- YieldOne large mackerel, filleted and cut up, serves two as a main course or four as a first course.
Menus and cookbooks around 1900 used "Indian" as shorthand for curry-seasoned, a legacy of the British colonial kitchen that crossed into American household books through the same channels as mulligatawny and kedgeree. Pairing it with mackerel is practical rather than exotic: mackerel is strongly flavoured and oily, and a spiced, slightly acidic sauce cuts it in a way that a plain butter sauce does not. The technique here, filleting, portioning, covering with buttered paper and giving the fish a short blast of heat, reads as the sort of professional method that domestic writers of the period were often said to be translating for cooks working without a brigade. Mackerel itself was cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast, which is why it appears so often in these fish chapters, more often than not broiled, if the general impression of these books is to be trusted; a baked-and-sauced treatment was the way to dress up an everyday fish for company.