Spiced Mackerel
Mix Spiced mackerel is appetizing. Select two nice fat mackerel and clean them without splitting them. Place them in a crockery dish and sprinkle them with pepper, adding three big cloves, three allspice, one blade of mace. cider vinegar and water in equal proportions and cover the fish with it. Cook three hours in a slow oven. Remove to the serving dish, pour the remaining vinegar and water left from the three hours' cooking over the fish and serve at once. The fish will keep for several days in a cool place.
A soused mackerel in the old style: whole fish braised slowly in acidulated liquid until the bones soften and the flesh takes up the spice. A few things need translating.
- The stray wordThe recipe opens with "Mix" for no apparent reason, most likely a printing slip. Ignore it and start with the fish.
- Slow ovenSomewhere in the 275-300F range on a modern dial. Three hours is far longer than the twenty minutes or so the fish needs to cook through; the long soak in acid also softens the fine pin bones. Higher heat will shred the flesh.
- Keep the dish coveredThe recipe does not say whether to cover it, but three uncovered hours in a slow oven will boil the liquid away and dry the fish. Use a deep ceramic or glass baking dish with a tight lid or a sheet of foil.
- Fresh, not salt"Clean them without splitting them" points to fresh mackerel left whole, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb each. Salt mackerel, also sold in this period, would need soaking overnight first and is not what is meant here.
- SaltNone is called for, and the dish will taste flat without it. Season the fish inside and out before the liquid goes over it.
- The spicesThree whole cloves, three whole allspice berries and one blade of mace — mace being the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold whole in blades or ground. About 1/4 teaspoon ground mace substitutes, though it will cloud the liquid.
- The liquidEqual parts cider vinegar and water, enough to submerge the fish — roughly a cup of each for two fish in a snug dish. Cutting the vinegar further with water is reasonable if the result tastes harsh.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; two fish will serve four as a first course or two as a main. The recipe says to serve at once, though the note that it keeps suggests it was also eaten cold.
- Keeping it"A cool place" meant a larder or cellar. Refrigerate it, covered and submerged in its liquid, and eat within three days.
Souse — fish cooked or steeped in spiced vinegar — is one of the oldest ways of stretching a catch a few days past landing, and it survives in British soused herring, Dutch rolmops and the Italian in saor tradition. Mackerel is the classic candidate because it is oily and spoils fast, so coastal and canal-fed markets sold it cheap and sold it quickly; the vinegar arrested what the ice house could not. By the time of this book the method seems to have become as much a breakfast and supper dish as a preserving necessity, which may be why the recipe treats several days' keeping as an afterthought rather than the whole point. Clove, allspice and mace are among the spices commonly used in pickling in this period.