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Anchovy Sauce for Beef
Wash four anchovies lightly and dry them well, then remove the bones, and cut the flesh into small pieces. Dredge some flour thickly over these, and fry them in a little butter over a gentle fire for five or six minutes. Pour half a pint of stock broth over them, and salt and pepper if required, and an inch or two of cucumber cut into dice. Simmer the sauce gently, and before sending to table stir into it a teaspoonful of bruised capers. Time to simmer, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A savoury brown sauce built on salt anchovies rather than a pounded paste, meant to be spooned over roast or boiled beef. The whole method hinges on the flour going into the pan with the fish and being cooked in the butter, so the anchovies dissolve into a thickened sauce rather than staying as fried scraps.
- Anchovies then and nowThe book assumes whole salt-packed anchovies, which is why they are washed, dried and boned. Modern tinned fillets in oil are already boned and much milder in salt; use six to eight of them, blot the oil, and skip the washing. If you buy salt-packed anchovies, rinse and soak them briefly before boning.
- SaltAdd none until the sauce has simmered and been tasted. Four salt anchovies plus capers plus stock can carry the seasoning entirely on their own, which is why the original hedges with "if required".
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Use a well-flavoured beef or veal stock; a thin broth will leave the sauce tasting mainly of flour.
- "Dredge some flour thickly"This is a roux made in reverse — figure on about a tablespoon of flour to a tablespoon of butter for the quantity of liquid given. Keep the fire genuinely gentle for the five or six minutes so the flour cooks out without the butter browning past nut colour.
- CucumberAn inch or two of cucumber comes to roughly 2 to 5 tablespoons diced, depending on the cucumber's girth. Peel and seed it; after twenty minutes' simmering the dice will be very soft, though the recipe says only to cut it into dice and gives no indication of how much shape it should keep.
- Bruised capersBruising means crushing them lightly with the flat of a knife to release the vinegar and brine. They go in at the last moment so that sharpness stays forward.
- Consistency and strainingTwenty minutes at a bare simmer will reduce the sauce noticeably; add a little more stock if it tightens past coating consistency. The recipe gives no instruction to strain, so as written the sauce keeps the pieces of fish and cucumber in it.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups before reduction, which the book reckons enough for five or six — roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons a plate, sauce as accent rather than gravy.
Anchovy sauce was one of the standard English accompaniments to beef and to boiled fish through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and bottled anchovy-based "essences" and ketchups were sold by London grocers from the eighteenth century onward. Victorian cookery generally liked a pungent, faintly sour foil to rich red meat, the same logic that produced horseradish and the sharp bottled sauces of the period. The stated cost of sixpence is a reminder that anchovies were cheap salt-fish, not a delicacy — the price of the beef would have been many times that of the sauce.