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Anchovy Sauce for Salmon
Incorporate with a pint of boiling melted butter a couple of tea-spoonfuls of essence of anchovies, and add cayenne and lemon-juice to suit the taste. Anchovies boned and pounded in a mortar may be substituted for essence of anchovies. Time, ten minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient, two tea-spoonfuls of the essence to a pint of sauce.
A short sauce that depends entirely on knowing what a Victorian cook meant by "melted butter." Read the first point before anything else.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn English cookery books of this period, melted butter means a thickened butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then whisked smooth with water or light stock and finished with more butter. Proportions vary from book to book, most using rather more butter than flour. Plain melted butter will not carry the anchovy well and is liable to split on the plate.
- A pintCassell's is imperial, so a pint is 20 fl oz, a little under 2.5 US cups. That is a generous quantity of sauce; the recipe gives no number of servings. Halve everything for a family dinner.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin, salty, vinegared anchovy extract, still sold in the UK in small bottles. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest supermarket equivalent; use it a little more sparingly, as it is thicker and saltier.
- Using whole anchovies insteadTwo or three oil-packed fillets, mashed to a paste with the back of a knife, stand in for the two teaspoons of essence. Salt-packed anchovies should be rinsed first, and no salt added to the sauce until you have tasted it.
- Do not boil after the anchovy goes inAdd the essence or paste off the heat, or over the barest simmer. Hard boiling drives off the aroma and can make the sauce grainy as the butter breaks out of the emulsion.
- Cayenne and lemonCayenne here means a pinch on a knife point, not a measured spoonful; it is there for warmth behind the salt. Lemon juice goes in last, a teaspoon at a time, tasted between additions.
- The ten minutesThe recipe does not say what the ten minutes covers; most likely it is the making of the sauce rather than a simmering time for the anchovy. Give the flour and butter two or three minutes before the liquid, then simmer the sauce until it coats a spoon.
- CostSixpence in a book of this period is shorthand for cheap: anchovy essence was an inexpensive way to give a plain white sauce a savoury edge.
Anchovy sauce was one of the accompaniments often served with boiled salmon in nineteenth-century England, holding much the same place that hollandaise or a herb butter does now — a sharp, salty foil to a rich, fatty fish. It rests on two Victorian kitchen fixtures: "melted butter," the flour-thickened all-purpose white sauce that appears under dozens of names in books of this era, and bottled essence of anchovies, a commercial extract generally traced to the London fish-sauce trade of the late eighteenth century and sold under proprietary labels for well over a hundred years. The pint yield is a reminder that this was written for households serving a whole poached salmon at table, carved for a crowd.