Anchovy Sauce
To butter sauce, stir in eight tablespoonfuls of essence of anchovy and two of lemon juice.
A one-line variation on a stock sauce, of the kind Victorian and Edwardian books printed by the dozen. Almost everything you need to know is in what it leaves out.
- "Butter sauce" means drawn butterIn English cookery books of this kind, butter sauce is the standard white sauce: a roux of butter and flour in roughly equal weight, thinned with water or fish stock and finished with more butter. It is not beurre blanc and not melted butter alone.
- The quantity is unstatedNo volume of butter sauce is given, so the eight tablespoons of anchovy essence are meaningless in isolation. A pint is a reasonable working assumption for a batch of sauce, but taste as you go rather than measuring blind.
- Essence of anchovy is not anchovy pasteThe Victorian bottled essence was a thin, salty, vinegar-and-spice-laced liquid, and much less concentrated than the dense modern tube paste. Substituting paste tablespoon for tablespoon would produce something close to inedible; start with a teaspoon or two of paste, or use colatura di alici, which is closer to the original in consistency, adding it cautiously.
- SaltAdd none until the anchovy is in and the sauce tasted. Between the essence and the butter there is usually enough.
- Add the lemon off the heatAcid added to a hot flour-thickened sauce can thin it and dull the anchovy. Stir the lemon juice in at the end, with the pan off the burner.
- Do not let it boil after the essence goes inBoiling drives off the volatile aromatics that make the sauce taste of anchovy rather than merely of salt. Warm it through only.
- Yield and servingIf a pint of sauce is assumed, it will serve six to eight. Anchovy sauce of this kind was most usually served with boiled fish.
Anchovy in bottled form was one of the workhorses of the nineteenth-century English larder: essence of anchovy, anchovy paste and the anchovy-based bottled sauces gave cooks a cheap, shelf-stable hit of savoury depth at a time when concentrated stock is unlikely to have been kept in many kitchens. The technique is older than the bottle -- Roman cooking leaned on fermented fish sauce for the same purpose -- but the Victorian version arrived ready-made from a grocer, and recipe books accordingly reduced whole sauces to a single line of instruction appended to a base everyone was assumed to know. Such preparations reflect the period's taste for pungent, sharp accompaniments to strong-flavoured meat, alongside the currant jellies and pepper sauces of the same kind.