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BROWN BUTTER SAUCE (for boiled Skate and other fish)
Dissolve two ounces of butter in a saucepan, and stir it till it is brown without burning. Add two table-spoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, four table-spoonfuls of good brown sauce, a table-spoonful of Harvey or Worcester sauce, a tea-spoonful of bruised capers, and half a tea-spoonful of anchovy. Stir the sauce over the fire till it boils, and serve it poured over the fish.
A compact fish sauce built on browned butter and a spoonful of made brown sauce. The whole thing takes about five minutes once the components are to hand, and it stands or falls on how far you take the butter.
- Browning the butterTwo ounces is 55 g. Melt over medium heat and keep it moving until the milk solids go nut-brown and the smell turns toasty; a few seconds past that and it is acrid, and the sauce cannot be rescued. Pull the pan off the heat before adding the vinegar, which will spit.
- "Good brown sauce"This means a made brown sauce of the espagnole or demi-glace type, not a modern bottled brown sauce. Four tablespoons is about 60 ml; a good reduced beef or veal stock, or a fish veloute darkened with a little glace, will stand in.
- Harvey sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy relish widely sold in Britain from the late 18th century and long since off the shelves. Worcestershire, which the recipe already offers as the alternative, is the direct substitute at the same quantity.
- Anchovy"Half a tea-spoonful of anchovy" most likely means anchovy essence, a common bottled larder item of the period. Use half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or one small mashed salted fillet, and taste before adding salt that, the capers and the Worcester already bring plenty.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth keeping; it is more aromatic than plain white wine vinegar. Two tablespoons is 30 ml, which is assertive against 55 g of butter, so add it in stages if you want a rounder sauce.
- Bruised capersCrush them with the flat of a knife rather than chopping, so they release brine without turning to mush. Rinse salt-packed capers first.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly 150 ml, enough for two to three portions of skate wing. Bring it to a boil as directed, then pour it over the drained fish immediately — it separates if it sits.
Skate with browned butter is one of the durable pairings of European fish cookery: the fish is mild and faintly ammoniac when less than fresh, and butter cooked to the nut stage with a sharp acid cuts through it. The French raie au beurre noir is the better-known relative, and this version is essentially that dish given a Victorian English accent rbrbrown sauch a made brown sauce, capers, anchovy, and a spoonful of the bottled sauces that defined the period's seasoning. Harvey's sauce, traditionally attributed to an English inn-keeper named Harvey in the late 1700s, was a fixture of the nineteenth-century table before Lea & Perrins' Worcestershire eclipsed it; that the book offers either interchangeably suggests how far that shift had gone by the time this dictionary was compiled.