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Fresh Boiled Mackerel
Clean the mackerel and wipe carefully with a dry cloth; wash them with another cloth dipped in weak vinegar; wrap in a coarse cloth (floured) basted to the shape of the fish. Put them into a pot with enough salted water to cover them, and boil them gently for half an hour. Drain them well. Take a cupful of water in which they have been boiled and put into a sauce pan, with a tablespoonful of walnut catsup, some anchovy paste or sauce, and the juice of half of a lemon. Let this boil up and add one tablespoonful of butter with a tablespoonful of flour; rub to a paste. Boil again and serve in sauce boat.
A plain Victorian fish poach with a sharp brown sauce built from the cooking liquor. Almost everything here still works except the timing, which will destroy the fish.
- Half an hour is far too longA whole mackerel of about 1 lb needs 8-10 minutes at a bare simmer; fillets need 4-5. The flesh is done when it parts from the backbone. Thirty minutes of boiling leaves it dry, shredded and grey.
- Simmer, do not boil"Boil them gently" is best taken as a bare simmer, the surface barely trembling rather than rolling. A rolling boil breaks mackerel apart, cloth or no cloth.
- The floured clothThe wrapping holds the fish together and keeps it off the pot bottom, standing in where no fish kettle was to hand. A perforated poaching insert, a plate, or a double layer of cheesecloth tied at both ends does the same job. The flour can be omitted.
- Walnut catsupA dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, vinegar and spice, still sold by a few British makers. Mushroom ketchup is the closest common substitute; failing that, use a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce plus a little soy, and taste before adding salt.
- Anchovy pasteTubed anchovy paste or two mashed oil-packed fillets. Between the anchovy, the ketchup and the salted poaching water, the sauce will already be seasoned; salt at the end only.
- The butter and flourButter and flour "rubbed to a paste" is beurre manié. Whisk it into the simmering liquid in small pieces off the heat, then return to a brief boil to cook out the raw flour. A cupful of liquor thickened with a tablespoon each gives a light pouring sauce, not a gravy.
- The vinegar wipeWeak vinegar was probably intended to freshen fish of uncertain age. Buy mackerel that smells of nothing but the sea; the oil in it turns quickly, and no amount of vinegar corrects it.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many fish are cooked; the cupful of sauce it makes suits about two whole mackerel, serving two.
Mackerel was among the cheaper fresh sea fish in nineteenth-century towns, and one of the few sold on Sundays in London by long-standing exception, because it spoils so fast that a day's delay ruined the catch. That oiliness explains the sauce: walnut ketchup, anchovy and lemon are all sharp, salty things chosen to cut a rich fish, and the same logic sits behind the gooseberry sauce traditionally served with mackerel in England. Walnut ketchup itself belongs to the older family of English ketchups made from mushrooms, walnuts or oysters rather than tomatoes, bottled in autumn from green walnuts and kept as a savoury seasoning through the year. Such bottled sauces could be bought ready-made, which is why the recipe assumes a cook can simply reach for them.