Escabetx de Verats (Marinated Mackerel)

This recipe is Catalan, but around the Mediterranean, the method is an old one for preserving fish briefly when they are cheap, abundant, and at their best. Escabetx, like escabeche, originated in Persia and was brought by Arabs (as al-sikbaj) to medieval Spain; Catalans claim that it was their form of the word, escabetx, that passed into other European…