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Anchovy Butter Sauce
Add to half a pint of good brown sauce, or sauce Espagnole, a piece of anchovy butter half the size of an egg, and also some lemon-juice to conceal the salt taste produced by the butter. Mix thoroughly and serve.
A compound-butter finish for a brown sauce, and one of the shortest entries in the book because it assumes you already have Espagnole standing by. The whole technique is in the last two words of the instruction.
- Off the heatThe recipe gives no temperature guidance at all, but compound butter is best whisked into sauce that is hot rather than simmering; if the pan returns to a boil the emulsion can break and the sauce turn greasy. Pull it off the burner, whisk in the butter in pieces, and serve at once.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is enough sauce for four to six portions of grilled or fried fish, steak, or brains.
- "Half the size of an egg"A workable reading is about 1 oz, roughly 2 tablespoons. Egg-size lumps were a common rule-of-thumb measure in Victorian cookery; treat it as an approximation and taste as you go.
- Anchovy butterThe standard method is to pound anchovy fillets or anchovy essence into softened butter, often passing it through a sieve. Modern anchovies in oil, mashed to a paste with an equal or greater weight of soft butter, give the same result. Anchovy essence is the Victorian shortcut.
- EspagnoleThe classic brown sauce: a brown roux moistened with brown stock and tomato, simmered long and skimmed. A good reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly will stand in; a jarred gravy will not, because there is nothing here to hide behind.
- The lemon juiceThe recipe frames it as masking salt, which it does, but the acid also lifts a sauce that is otherwise fat on fat. Start with a teaspoon, taste, and add more before you add any salt at all — between the anchovy and the reduced stock, the sauce is usually salted already.
- ServingA sauce of this kind suits grilled or fried fish and steak. Keep it warm in a bain-marie for no more than a few minutes; it does not hold or reheat well.
Anchovy has been the English kitchen's chief savoury seasoning since the seventeenth century, when barrels of salted Mediterranean fish arrived alongside the sauces and ketchups that Georgian and Victorian cooks used to deepen almost anything brown. By the time Cassell's was compiled, anchovy essence and anchovy butter were pantry staples, and the book carries a whole cluster of anchovy preparations — butter, paste, toast, sauces both white and brown. This particular entry shows the Anglo-French compromise that governs the volume: the base is Espagnole, one of the French mother sauces codified by Carême earlier in the century, and the finish is an English compound butter dropped in at the last moment. The instruction to add lemon juice "to conceal the salt taste" acknowledges just how salty the anchovy butter is.