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Mackerel, Baked in Cream
(Austria.) Skin, bone, and slice a large fish into four pieces, season it and fry it in butter. Drain it and keep warm. Mix 1/2 pint of white stock or Bechamel sauce with two tablespoonfuls of sherry and the yolk of an egg. Stir over the fire, pour it over the fish, adding chopped parsley, onion, and bread-crumbs over the top of the dish. Bake till brown.
A short, workable recipe once you settle two things the original leaves loose: how much liquid, and how hot the oven. The egg yolk is the hinge.
- The yolk must not boilStir the yolk into the sauce off the direct heat, or over the gentlest flame, and stop as soon as it thickens. Brought to a simmer it scrambles and the sauce breaks into grains that will not smooth out again.
- "1/2 pint"An imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups; a US half-pint is 1 cup. Either works for four pieces of fish — you want enough to coat, not to submerge — so err toward the smaller amount.
- White stockA light veal or chicken stock, unseasoned and unreduced. Bechamel is the easier route: 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, and the milk, cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Despite the title, no cream is called for; the bechamel is the cream in the dish.
- "Bake till brown"About 400F for 10 to 15 minutes, until the crumbs colour and the sauce bubbles at the edge. The fish is already cooked from the frying, so this step is only for the crust — a longer bake dries the mackerel and risks the yolk-bound sauce splitting.
- Buttered crumbs brown betterToss the crumbs with a little melted butter before scattering them, or finish under the broiler for a minute. Dry crumbs on a wet sauce tend to go pasty rather than crisp.
- The onionChopped raw onion strewn on top will still be raw after fifteen minutes. Soften it in the frying butter first, or use a finely minced shallot.
- The fishOne large mackerel skinned and filleted gives two sides; cut each across for the four pieces. Mackerel is oily and spoils fast — buy it firm and bright-eyed and use it the same day. Season and flour the pieces lightly before frying so they release from the pan.
- YieldFour servings as written, as a first course or a light main with potatoes.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of collections that gathered "foreign" dishes country by country for English-speaking households, and the label (Austria.) is doing more work here than the cooking is. Austria at the date of publication was part of an empire with an Adriatic coast and its own sea fisheries, though mackerel was not a staple of Viennese cooking; what is Austrian about the dish is the manner — fish fried in butter, masked in a white sauce enriched with sherry and egg yolk, crumbed and browned — which resembles the vocabulary of the Viennese and wider Central European hotel kitchens of the period, themselves speaking a dialect of French cookery. Sauces thickened with egg yolk at the last moment were common before stabilised commercial products existed, and the crumb-and-brown finish was a familiar way to turn leftover or plainly cooked fish into something presentable at table, sent to the oven in the same dish it was served from. The vagueness about stock "or Bechamel" is characteristic too: these books assumed a cook who already had one or the other on hand.