Pickled Fish

Know you all had a great trip to Virginia. How many cookbooks did you buy, and how many slips and seeds did you “liberate”?

While you were checking out the colonial kitchens, did you keep up with the news? Nicole Ritchie is off to jail on DUI, Britney Spears had a brawl with her mother, and Lindsay Lohan got picked up on DUI and possession of cocaine two days after leaving rehab. Says something about their rehabilitation program to have her back on alcohol and drugs two days after leaving the place. And Paris Hilton said now that she is 26, she is “getting her life back together” and launching a line of designer clothes. I hadn’t noticed that she ever wore many clothes.

Perhaps we should send your Cornmeal Mush recipe to the L.A. Jail that houses these delinquent females. I am sure none of them ever ate anything like it.

Better yet, sentence the spoiled darlings to a few weeks learning how to cook like the early settlers did. Can’t you just see Paris, Nicole, Lindsay, and Britney all dressed up in the quaint Colonial Williamsburg costumes, demonstrating hearth cooking for the visitors? I would pay just to see them trying to catch a chicken and wring its neck, and then plucking out the feathers and cleaning it before starting to cook it. It would be a lot like Paris and Nicole’s TV show, only not rehearsed and staged.

You were mentioning the fish diet at Jamestown yesterday, and I was looking through some of my colonial Virginia cookbooks when I came across this recipe for Pickled Fish. I have never tried it, but probably the early colonists used something like it. I will bet the earliest recipes were only vinegar, water, and salt. Those other spices would not have been available to many families.

Pickled Fish:

1 pint vinegar
1 pint water
Salt to taste
20 peppercorns
20 allspice
5 bay leaves
5 sliced onions
4 slices lemons

Put the vinegar, water, salt, peppercorns, allspice, bay leaves and 4 slices of onion in a large stockpot. Boil for 30 minutes. Add the lemon slices and remove them after 5 minutes. Simmer the fish in this liquid until you can pull out a fin. Cook only a few small fish or fillets of fish at a time.

Pack the fish in a stone crock with one or more slices of raw onions between the layers. Pour over the hot liquid when all fish are cooked.

Cover and keep in a cool place. After a few days the liquid will form a jelly around the fish. Will keep for several weeks.

This is enough liquid for a half gallon of fish.