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Admiral's Sauce
Make half a pint of melted butter, and put into it one tea-spoonful of chopped capers, three or four shallots chopped, two pounded anchovies, and a little thin lemon-rind. Let all simmer gently; add pepper, salt, and the juice of a lemon, and serve in a tureen. Time to simmer, till the anchovies are dissolved. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a pint of sauce.
A Victorian anchovy-and-caper sauce for boiled or fried fish. The one thing to get right is the base: "melted butter" in a British cookery book of this date is not butter melted in a pan but a thickened butter sauce.
- "Melted butter" means a sauceVictorian melted butter is butter thickened with flour and let down with water or fish stock, then simmered until smooth; the proportions vary a good deal from book to book, from a mere dessertspoonful of flour to a much heavier roux. Simply melting butter gives you a broken, greasy sauce that will not carry the anchovy.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. The book nonetheless states the yield as a pint of sauce.
- Pounded anchoviesTwo salt-cured anchovies from the barrel, rinsed and mashed to paste in a mortar. Two oil-packed fillets, drained and chopped fine, are the nearest substitute; about a teaspoon of anchovy paste also works, and needs less salt afterwards.
- ShallotsVictorian shallots generally ran smaller than modern ones, often little bigger than a clove, so three or four are probably nearer one medium modern shallot, chopped very fine. Sweating them in the butter first takes the raw edge off.
- Lemon-rindRind pared thin with a knife, no white pith, added in strips so it can be lifted out before serving. Grated zest will not strain out and turns the sauce bitter as it sits.
- "Till the anchovies are dissolved"A few minutes at a bare simmer. Keep it below a boil once the lemon juice goes in; a flour-thickened butter sauce held at a rolling boil with acid in it can thin and separate.
- SaltTaste before adding any. Anchovies and capers between them usually supply enough, especially if you use salt-packed fish.
- Yield and servingAbout a pint, enough for six to eight servings alongside fish. Serve hot in a warmed tureen or sauceboat; it will thicken and skin over as it cools.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English sauce list, when a dictionary of cookery was expected to supply dozens of variations built on the same foundation of "melted butter" — the flour-thickened butter sauce that stood in for the French veloute in ordinary households. Anchovy, caper and lemon in various combinations were the standard accompaniments to boiled and fried fish, and the naming of them was largely a matter of fashion; the title has sometimes been linked, though on no firm evidence, to the French sauce d'amiral, another anchovy-and-caper fish sauce of the same family. The nautical label is decoration rather than provenance, of a piece with the Victorian habit of dressing plain kitchen work in grander clothes. The stated cost of one shilling is a reminder of what made it worth listing: barrelled anchovies and pickled capers were shelf-stable imports that let a cook lift plain fish without fresh luxuries.