My supper this evening was some of the leftover chicken from the roast we had on Sunday. I made a salad with good chunks of the chicken, green leaves and croutons with a dressing that again included some of the Spicy Red Currant Jelly that has been sitting in the back of the fridge for years. The croutons were made with slices from stale French stick that I threw in the oven with some olive oil until toasted. The kids were good enough to acknowledge how good it looked but were happier with their plates of spaghetti.

The chicken had been a one pot roast. I par boiled some potatoes and tucked them around the chicken damped it all down with some olive oil and gave it a good dusting of smoked paprika, salt and pepper. It all went into a medium over for about 90 minutes. Halfway through I mixed in two sliced red peppers and three heads of fresh garlic.

The only complaint from the kids was the lack of gravy.

It has gone cold again and the wind that has been whipping up from The Mersey has lowered the temperature even further. Despite that the sun has been out and during lunch there was nothing but blue sky overhead.

We have been home alone now for almost 48 hours and so far the sharp knives have not been out. Most of the family have settled down into rhythm of revision and the exams start tomorrow. There will be a release of pressure once they are finally underway and the end is in sight.

As the evening glooming gathered up around the house I looked out of the window over the garden and against the black silhouette of the trees I saw the the quick sharp flicker of a bat. Its flight was jerky and indistinct. It was lost against the dark and then flickered again.

The Romans used mackerel to make garum, a fermented fish sauce similar to fish sauce.

According to a 1^st century BC Roman poet Martial, the preparation of garum involved securing “the blood of a still-gasping mackerel,” which was mixed with salt, and left to ferment for as long as three months. As well as mackerel, prawns, sardines, anchovies, tuna, salmon, red mullet and oysters were used. There is a temptation to think of all this as little more than a mess of rotting fish but the use of the word fermentation should tell us that there is more going on. It was important to use fresh fish. Enzymes in the gut of the fish reacted with the salt, producing an acrid and potent smelling brine. There were different grades of garum with some writers having mackerel as producing the best with tuna second.

The fermentation took two to three months and was carried out on an almost industrial scale. The importance of salt meant concentrated in areas where there were salt pans – Barcelona  was famous for its garum.

The residual liquid was strained off, and carefully bottled and sealed. The result? A condiment similar to the Thai fish sauce you can now buy in most supermarkets and the acrid, foul smelling prawn paste it is sometimes possible to buy from Siam food markets. I once had a block of this I kept in a plastic container in the back of the fridge. It hid there for years, to be taken out occasionally if I was making a curry. Lifting the lid would release the smell, dark, pungent and peaty. Only a small piece was ever required and its taste would sit deep in the background of the dish adding an earthy fecund, grunt to the flavour.

The mackerel was well known to the ancients, and those taken near the Island of Paros were particularly celebrated. The famous fish-sauce called garum, made from their entrails, was invented by the Greeks. 

Closer to home we have Worcester Sauce, made from rotten anchovies, producing the same deepening of flavour to a shepherd’s pie or dish of macaroni cheese.

It was a bloody business and one writer in Blackwoods Magazine  about 1870 saw it was the fish-wife’s revenge: “When gutting is at its height their hands, their neck, their busts, their “dreadful faces thronge’d, and fiery arms”, their every bit about them, fore and aft, are spotted and besprinkled with little scarlet clots of gills and guts. A bob down to slice a herring and a bob up to throw it into the basket and the job is done. These ruthless widows seize upon the dead herrings with such a fierceness as almost to denote revenge for their husband’s deaths – victims of the herring lottery – and the widows scatter about the gills and guts as if they had no bowels of compassion”.

Business in Deep Waters

You need a sharp knife and be prepared to get your hands bloody.

It is best to do this by the rock pools down by the beach. They are perfect for washing down the fish once you are done and well placed for the seagulls that will start to gather a minute or two after you start.

Take a fish in your left hand belly up and head pointing away from you. Put the point of the knife in the small hole towards the tail of the fish, properly known as its vent, and when the blade has torn the skin move it gently with a slight sawing motion towards the head, slitting open its belly until you get to the pectoral fins beneath the head. Take the knife carefully between these fins pulling it out just before the gills.  As you are doing all this be careful not to go too far into the gut cavity.

With your fingers draw out the guts, ideally in one ferreting motion, from the head back down to the vent, making sure to take everything out, then push your thumb hard up against the back bone and run it down forcing against the nail the black line of blood that lies there and clearing out any residue of gut. A Guide to filleting mackerel produced for the Billingsgate Seafood Training School tells you not to use your bare hands for this and to put on surgical gloves. But you will be on holiday, flush with the success of your catch, there will be a pint to hand and your hands should already be bloody from the killing of them in the boat. You can always clean up in the sea.

It can be instructive to take a look at what you are pulling out. Mackerel are indiscriminate eaters cruising the dark waters mouth wide open, all part of one vast pack, taking in plankton, sprat and baby squid. Sometimes as the bloody gob of gut lies in your hand they can be seen undigested and perfectly formed as if they had only been taken from the sea a few moments before.  Look closely and the sprat maybe a baby mackerel, only an inch or so long but otherwise the perfect copy of the fish you are holding in your other hand, its tiger stripes and colour still vibrant back in the sun-light. This last year as a line of mackerel was spilling into the bottom of the boat one of them hawked out a small sprat its skin abraded by the sharp teeth of its devourer.

Throw the guts for the gulls.

You may have to wait a minute or two before they realise you are there. But one will be flying on its determined straight line out to sea and will swerve off course when it sees you, or another will catch what is going on from its perch on one of the lights on the pier. Rather than keeping the news to itself it will hawk back its head and broadcast a triumphant cry to all and sundry that there are guts to be had and soon there will be a dozen or so circling overhead ready to take their fill from the water, the air filling with the sound of their bark and bray, the birds reeling up and then down in a rush to the water, sharp yellow beaks snatching through the flurrying wings before pulling away. If one has been particularly greedy it will be chased on its way back to Owen Island and if inexperienced forced to cough up its meal back to the sea for it to be gobbled down by its stronger pursuer.

Wash out the fish in one of the pools making sure you get ride of any residue of blood.