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Boiled or Baked Salt Mackerel
The fish should be soaked in plenty of cold water twelve hours or more and change the water three times; have the skin side up. When well soaked, take from water, wipe dry.
This is really only the freshening step — the book assumes the cook knows what to do with a soaked salt fish once it is dry. The soaking is the part that decides whether the dish is edible, so it is worth doing properly.
- Skin side up is the whole trickSkin side up -- the direction the book gives. The usual explanation is that the dissolved salt sinks away from the flesh and settles at the bottom of the bowl, so the skin is uppermost; this is the traditional rationale rather than anything the book demonstrates.
- Plenty of water, and change itUse a wide dish and enough cold water to cover generously — a quart or more per fish. Three changes over twelve hours is the minimum; heavily salted fish may want twenty-four hours and four or five changes. Refrigerate, or keep it somewhere genuinely cold.
- Modern salt mackerel is milderModern salt mackerel is often milder -- much of the salt mackerel sold now is more lightly cured than the barrel fish of 1900, so it may need less soaking. Taste a shred after eight hours; if it is pleasantly savoury rather than harsh, stop soaking. Over-soaking leaves it flabby and flavourless.
- Boiling, if you boil itSlip the fish into water barely at a simmer and hold it there 8 to 10 minutes for a fillet, never at a rolling boil, which shreds it. Salt fish was also sometimes poached in milk and water for a softer result.
- Baking or broilingThe book gives no temperature. A hot oven, around 425F, for about 15 minutes, or under the broiler skin side up for 5 to 8 minutes, dotted with butter. Cook to 145F at the thickest point.
- The usual finishThe period serving is melted butter poured over, sometimes with a little chopped parsley or a scattering of hard-boiled egg, with boiled potatoes alongside. A cream sauce made with the poaching milk was another common finish.
- YieldOne whole split salt mackerel of about a pound serves two as a main course, or three or four at breakfast.
Salt mackerel was a staple of the American Atlantic coast and a fixture of the nineteenth-century breakfast table, cheap enough to be everyday food and sold from the barrel or wooden box it was packed in. Mackerel is oily and spoils fast, and much of the catch was split, gutted and packed in salt at sea or on shore; graded by size and quality, it moved inland by rail to households that had never seen the ocean. Because an oily fish goes rancid even in salt, grading and brisk turnover mattered. What needed writing down was the freshening, since a badly soaked mackerel is inedibly salty and a badly drained one is worse. The appearance of such a bare entry in a general household book is a fair measure of how ordinary the dish was.