escabeche a preparation of fried fish which has been allowed to cool and is then soused with a hot marinade of vinegar and other ingredients. The dish may be served hot, but it is more commonly kept and served cold. Indeed, the technique may well have originated as a means of preserving fish. The term occurs not only in its Spanish form, as here, but also in French (escabèche), Italian (scapece), Algerian (scabetch), and so on; and it appears in 17th- and 18th-century English cookery books as ‘caveach’, a word which could be either a noun or a verb.
