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Carp, Sauce For
Dissolve about one ounce of butter in a saucepan, and stir into it very smoothly a dessert-spoonful of flour, a little gravy, a cupful of good cream, and two anchovies chopped finely. Let it boil, stir it well, then add a table-spoonful of soy, season with salt, and, just before serving, squeeze the juice of a lemon into the sauce.
A short flour-thickened cream sauce built on two salty umami boosters, meant for a whole stewed or baked carp. It comes together in under ten minutes, and the only real risk is over-salting.
- Add the lemon off the heatAdd the lemon at the last moment -- acid can split cream if the sauce is boiling hard, though the flour gives some protection. Pull the pan off the heat, let it stop bubbling, then squeeze the lemon in and serve at once.
- "A little gravy"This means a few spoonfuls of savoury liquid — the reduced cooking liquor from the fish, or a light meat stock. The quantity is genuinely vague; start with 2–3 tablespoons and judge by consistency.
- SoyVictorian 'soy' meant a dark bottled soy sauce imported through the eastern trade, generally heavier and less sharp than an ordinary modern soy sauce. A full tablespoon of today's soy may read as very salty; two teaspoons is a safer starting point.
- AnchoviesProbably the salt-cured barrel anchovies usual in Victorian kitchens. The recipe says to chop them finely; they will break down as the sauce boils. Two oil-packed fillets, or a scant teaspoon of anchovy paste, is a workable equivalent.
- Salt last, or not at allAnchovy and soy together supply most of the seasoning. Taste after the sauce has boiled and before adding any salt at all.
- Cook the flour out"Let it boil" is doing real work here: the roux needs two or three minutes at a simmer to lose its raw taste and thicken properly. A dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons, which gives a pourable sauce rather than a coating one.
- YieldAbout a cup of finished sauce, enough to accompany a modest whole fish.
Carp was a pond fish before it was a river fish in England: monastic and manorial stew ponds kept it alive and on hand through Lent and winter, and it remained a standard table fish into the nineteenth century. Its flesh is soft and mildly muddy, which is why the old cookbooks pair it almost invariably with something assertive -- a brown gravy sauce, horseradish, or, as here, anchovy and soy. Bottled soy had been arriving in Britain through the East India trade since the eighteenth century and by Cassell's day sat alongside ketchup, anchovy essence and Harvey's sauce as a routine store-cupboard seasoning rather than an exotic one.