Smoked Mackerel Pâté Sandwich

Every British supermarket chiller keeps vacuum packs of hot-smoked mackerel, two bronzed fillets to a sleeve, plain or armoured in cracked black pepper, priced near the bottom of the fish shelf. The pâté is the main thing the country does with them. Fish, cream cheese, lemon, horseradish and a fork, and the cheapest oily fish in the case turns into something that gets served to guests: a dense, smoky, pale-brown spread that goes onto toast as a starter and between two slices as a working lunch. It is fish cookery for people who do not want to cook fish, and it has quietly become the standard modern member of Britain's long line of fish spreads.

The method barely earns the word. The skin peels off each fillet in one whole sheet, a finger runs down the centre line for pin bones, and the flesh breaks into a bowl. The smokehouse kiln has already set it firm and opaque, so there is no pan and no heat anywhere in the job, just cold assembly. Cream cheese or crème fraîche goes in at about half the weight of the fish, then lemon juice, then horseradish, then enough black pepper to register. A fork keeps the flakes; a food processor left running a few seconds too long collapses the bowl into a gummy mousse with nothing left to bite. Too much dairy and the smoke disappears into something like scented butter. No lemon and the fish oils sit heavy on the tongue by the second mouthful.

Because the spread is dense, the bread does the structural work. Granary or wholemeal toast is the standard footing, sturdy and faintly sweet against the smoke. Dark rye pushes it toward Scandinavia; a soft white bap takes it fishing. Untoasted bread gets cold butter first, a seal that keeps an oily filling from soaking through. Then the crunch: cucumber in thin rounds, watercress, pickled red onion, capers if the jar is open. A closed sandwich wants the pâté spread to the corners and pressed once, because a thick dollop in the middle shoots out the sides at the first bite. On open toast it can go on twice as thick, which is how the pubs serve it.

Opening the packet is the loudest moment of the smell: oak smoke and warm fish oil, kipperish but rounder, with the faint sweetness the brine leaves behind. The finished pâté is quieter and colder. From the fridge it spreads stiff, flecks of bronze skin and grey-pink flake still visible in it, and the first bite runs cool and dense, smoke and cream together, the lemon cutting in about halfway through. The horseradish does its work in the nose rather than on the tongue, the same trick it pulls beside roast beef. Against all that softness, the cucumber gives the one loud crunch in the sandwich.

It lives wherever fresh fish meets a counter. Fishmongers and farm shops sell it in tubs beside the fillets it came from; smokehouse cafes from Cornwall to the Hebrides spread it on their own toast; gastropub chalkboards list it as a starter with sourdough and something pickled. At home it is the standard first answer to a pack bought on good intentions, the label promising omega-3 and the date ticking. Peppered fillets make a hotter batch and ambush anyone who seasons from habit, since their crust of cracked pepper rides into the bowl. No recipe owns any of this; the proportions are house rules, argued over quietly and never written down.

The family sorts by cure and by texture. The smoked mackerel and horseradish sandwich keeps the fillet whole, flakes laid on like sliced meat, a different bite from the same packet. Smoked salmon pâté starts from cold-smoked fish, silkier and barely set, so it leans harder on the dairy. Kipper pâté is the herring reading, saltier and bonier work. Taramasalata shares the colour scheme and nothing else, an emulsion of cured roe whipped with bread and oil rather than a bound flake. And the old potted pastes in their little jars, Shippam's and its kin, are the spread's Victorian grandparents, fish milled smooth and sealed for the cupboard and the long wait; this one is made on a Tuesday and eaten by Thursday.

Mackerel baps and the mackerel wars

The fish under the spread carried a decade of headlines. In January 2011 Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish Fight went out on Channel 4 with an instruction attached: ease off the cod and eat mackerel, an abundant, fast-growing, certified-sustainable fish that Britain landed in quantity and mostly sent abroad. He spent part of the series pressing mackerel baps on a cod-loyal public to prove the swap was painless. For a couple of years mackerel was the conscience fish, the one you could order without consulting a list.

The trouble was already in the water. From the late 2000s the stock moved north and west, and in 2010 Iceland raised its own quota from a token few thousand tonnes to 130,000 while the Faroes went to 150,000; Norway shut its ports to their boats, Scottish harbours turned their landings away, and the papers filed the whole affair under the mackerel wars. With no agreement on shares, the combined catch ran past the scientific advice year after year. The MSC certificates fell in 2012, all of them at once, and in January 2013 the Marine Conservation Society took mackerel off its Fish to Eat list, two years almost to the week after a television campaign had told Britain to switch to it. Line-caught mackerel was quietly put back on the list that May.

Getting the label back took a coalition. Fleets from across northern Europe, handline skiffs to ocean-going pelagic trawlers, organised in 2012 to prove the stock could be fished responsibly, and recertification came through in 2016; for three seasons the blue tick sat back on the packs in the chiller. Then the stock assessment dropped below the precautionary line while the quotas stayed stacked above the advice, the auditors moved early, and on 2 March 2019 every North-East Atlantic mackerel certificate was suspended again, four certificates across eight countries, supertrawler and handliner alike.