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Anchovy Butter
Take six pickled anchovies, cut off their heads, wash and bone them; then pound them with sufficient butter to make a paste, and add a little scalded and chopped parsley. If a pestle and mortar should not be at hand, the anchovies may be made into a paste and mixed with the butter with a broad knife on a piece of board. This butter is very useful to flavour many sauces, especially those that are used for beef steaks. Average cost for a half-pint jar, 1s. 8d. Time, half an hour.
A compound butter of the old school: no quantity is given for the butter itself, only the size of the jar it fills. Work backwards from that and the rest is straightforward.
- How much butterA half-pint jar in imperial measure holds 10 fl oz, so figure roughly 8-9 oz of butter to six anchovies, remembering the jar has to hold the fish as well. That gives a mild, sauce-thickening butter; halve the butter if you want it assertive enough to melt over a steak on its own.
- "Pickled anchovies"In this period that means anchovies cured in salt and packed in barrels, sold whole with heads and bones on; that form is still sold in Italian delis as alici sotto sale. Rinse them well and soak 10 minutes if very salty. Oil-packed fillets from a tin work: use about 10-12, since they are smaller and already trimmed.
- Do not add saltThe anchovies bring plenty. Start with unsalted butter, taste at the end, and adjust only then.
- Scalded parsleyDropping the parsley into boiling water for a few seconds and draining it sets the colour and takes the raw edge off, so the green stays green in the finished butter rather than browning. Squeeze it dry in a cloth before chopping or the butter will weep.
- Mortar, knife, or processorA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but use cold-but-pliable butter and pulse; if it warms and splits you lose the emulsion. The knife-on-a-board method in the original is genuinely effective and gives a coarser, more interesting texture.
- SievingFor sauce work, push the finished paste through a fine sieve. Anchovy skin and any missed bone leave threads that show up badly once the butter melts into a sauce.
- Using it in sauceWhisk it in off the heat, in small pieces, at the very end. Boiling it will break the butter and coarsen the anchovy flavour into something harsh.
- Keeping and yieldRoughly half a pint (10 fl oz), enough for eight to ten servings over steak. Roll in parchment and refrigerate a week, or freeze the log for three months and slice off coins as needed.
- The cost line1s. 8d. is Victorian shillings and pence and is of no practical use beyond telling you anchovies were a moderately dear store-cupboard item.
Compound butters " butter pounded with a strong flavouring and set aside to firm up " were a backbone of nineteenth-century English kitchens: this is a component rather than a dish, a way of holding a flavour ready. Anchovy in particular did the work that a bottle of Worcestershire or a stock cube does now, supplying salt and savoury depth to gravies, and it was already deeply established in English cooking through anchovy essence and Georgian ketchups. The pairing with beef steak that the recipe singles out is among the most durable uses; beurre d'anchois and its relatives survive in French practice as one of the standard compound butters, and salt-cured anchovies pounded to paste are often linked, by tradition rather than demonstrable descent, to the Roman fermented fish sauces.