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ANCHOVY SAUCE (another way)
A quick and easy way of making anchovy sauce is to stir two or three spoonfuls of prepared essence of anchovy, which may be bought at any grocer's, into a pint of melted butter. Let the sauce boil, and flavour with lemon-juice. Time, ten minutes to boil. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient, two tea-spoonfuls to a pint.
A shortcut sauce that depends entirely on knowing what a Victorian cook meant by "melted butter" — which is not melted butter.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not an ingredientIn English cookery of this period melted butter means the standard flour-thickened butter sauce: roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together, whisked into a pint of water or milk. Plain melted butter with essence stirred in will simply separate into oil and paste.
- A pint here is 20 fl ozCassell's is British, so the imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces, not 16. That is a generous quantity of sauce, enough for eight to ten servings alongside fish.
- Essence of anchovyThe bottled essence sold by Victorian grocers was a thin, salty, often cochineal-tinted anchovy extract. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest survivor, though it is thicker and less sharp; start with a teaspoon, thin it with a little of the hot sauce, then stir it back in.
- The contradictory quantitiesThe text opens with "two or three spoonfuls" to a pint and closes with "two tea-spoonfuls to a pint." The two cannot both be right and the original gives no way to reconcile them. Season by taste: essence is very salty and brands vary enormously in strength.
- Ten minutes' boiling is too longThe timing most likely refers to the flour base, which does need several minutes to lose its raw taste. Anchovy flavour is volatile and the salt concentrates as the sauce reduces, so add the essence and lemon juice at the end and bring it barely back to the boil.
- Salt and lemonDo not salt the base. Between the essence and the butter the sauce arrives salted; the lemon juice is there to cut that, and should go in off the heat so it does not turn flat.
- ServingThis is the traditional accompaniment to boiled or baked white fish — cod, turbot, brill, hake — and to fish pies.
"Melted butter" was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for well over a century, the base from which parsley, egg, caper, shrimp and anchovy sauces were all struck off, and foreign cooks mocked it accordingly. Bottled essence of anchovy — Burgess's being the best known of the London brands — put the flavouring within reach of any household that could get to a grocer, which may be why this is offered as the quick alternative to pounding salted anchovies by hand. The costing of fourpence is the sort of detail that makes this dictionary useful a century on: it was written for a middle-class household running to a budget, where a pint of sauce that could dress a whole boiled cod for a few pence was worth printing.