Home › The Principles of Cookery › Anchovy Sauce
Anchovy Sauce
Take six anchovies, cut off their heads, and wash them well, then let them boil gently in a quarter of a pint of water until they are dissolved. Strain the liquid, and add to it a pint of melted butter, cayenne and nutmeg to taste, and two table-spoonfuls of port wine. Serve with the fish. The sauce should be poured over boiled fish and round fried fish. Time to boil, half an hour. Sufficient for a large-sized dish of fish. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the wine.
A Victorian fish sauce that depends entirely on one piece of vocabulary: "melted butter" here is not butter melted in a pan but the standard English flour-thickened butter sauce. Read it as plain melted butter and you will end up with an oily, broken pint of fat.
- "Melted butter" means a white roux sauce"Melted butter" means a flour-thickened butter sauce -- In nineteenth-century English kitchens melted butter is a working sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, cooked to the consistency of thin cream. It is assumed here rather than given, as a separate foundation recipe; proportions vary from book to book. This is the hinge of the dish.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 imperial fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. The pint of melted butter is 20 imperial fl oz, about 2.5 US cups, which is a great deal of sauce and matches the stated "large-sized dish of fish."
- The anchovies are salted, not tinnedSix anchovies means six whole salt-cured fish, heads on, from a barrel or jar. Washing removes the surface salt. Modern tinned fillets in oil are the nearest equivalent at roughly two fillets per fish, but they are already filleted and considerably less salty, so taste before adding any salt at all.
- Half an hour is for whole salted fishThe long simmer exists to break down bone, skin and flesh until the fish disappears into the water. Oil-packed fillets collapse in three or four minutes over low heat, and boiling them longer only drives off the liquid and concentrates the salt.
- Strain, and mean itEven after thirty minutes there may be vertebrae and skin. Press the solids through a fine sieve rather than discarding them, since flavour remains in the pulp.
- Nutmeg and cayenneGrate the nutmeg fresh and use it sparingly, an eighth of a teaspoon or less against 2.5 cups of sauce. The original leaves both quantities to taste, so add the cayenne cautiously.
- The portTwo tablespoons of a ruby port, added off the heat, keeps its sweetness and colour. It will tint the sauce a dull pinkish brown, which is expected.
- Yield and servingAbout 2.5 cups; the original says only that it is sufficient for a large-sized dish of fish. The distinction in the original is worth keeping: poured over boiled fish, and pooled around fried fish so the crust stays crisp.
- CostEightpence in pre-decimal money. The original quotes the figure exclusive of the wine, without saying why.
Anchovy sauce is the workhorse of the English fish table, and a Victorian cook was expected to build it on top of another, still more basic one. Salted anchovies had reached English kitchens through the Mediterranean trade long before, and by the eighteenth century they were less a fish than a seasoning: anchovy essence, anchovy paste and anchovy ketchup all sold in bottles, and Worcestershire sauce, generally said to have been blended in the mid-to-late 1830s, carried them into a wider public. The habit of dissolving whole salted fish into a savoury liquid is often traced back to Roman garum, though the English line runs more directly through the medieval and early modern taste for sharp, salty, wine-spiked sauces served against plainly cooked meat and fish. The port here is doing what a splash of wine does, softening the salt and giving colour to a sauce that would otherwise look grey.