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Cockle Sauce
Prepare a gallon of cockles as for boiling (see the following rscipe). Set them on the fire, and when the shells open, drain the liquid from them, throw the shells away, and strain the liquid through muslin, to clear it from sand. Stir in a pint of good melted butter, and add a table-spoonful of vinegar, or the juice of a lemon, and half a tea-spoonful of white pepper. Stir the sauce over the fire for two or three minutes, but do not let it boil, and serve it with cod or haddock. Time, about twenty minutes altogether. Sufficient for four pounds of fish. Probable cost of cockles, 3d. per quart.
A Victorian shellfish sauce built on the older meaning of "melted butter" — that is, a butter sauce thickened with flour, not simply butter liquefied in a pan. Read the recipe with that in mind and it makes sense; read it literally and you get a greasy pint of butter.
- "Melted butter" means butter sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery books this is a standing name for a thin white sauce of flour, water or milk, and butter, roughly the consistency of pouring cream. A pint of it (20 fl oz in imperial measure, about 2.5 US cups) is the base into which the cockle liquor goes.
- Do not let it boilThe recipe is firm on this. A melted-butter sauce of this kind will separate if it is boiled, leaving oily butter sitting on watery liquor. Keep it below a simmer and stir the whole time.
- A gallon of cocklesAn imperial gallon of cockles in the shell is a large quantity, somewhere in the region of 7-8 lb, and yields only a modest amount of shelled meat and liquor. Fishmongers now sell cockles by weight rather than volume; ask for about 3-3.5 kg live, in shell.
- Purge them first, and strain twiceCockles live in sand and hold a great deal of it. Several hours in cold salted water, changed two or three times, removes most of it; straining the liquor through damp muslin as directed removes the rest. Grit in this sauce is the usual failure.
- The meats are not really thrown awayThe instruction to discard the shells is not obviously an instruction to discard the cockles, and other recipes of the period do shell the opened cockles and stir the meats into the finished sauce. If you do so, add them at the end and give them only a minute, as they toughen quickly.
- Discard any that stay shutCockles that do not open with heat were dead before cooking and should go in the bin, along with any that smell of ammonia or have broken shells.
- Yield"Sufficient for four pounds of fish" means enough for a whole boiled or baked cod or haddock serving six to eight people. Halve everything for a domestic-sized fillet.
- The price noteThreepence a quart tells you cockles were among the cheapest things in the market — a poor man's shellfish. They are dearer relative to white fish now, so the sauce has quietly changed class.
Cockles were gathered on the tidal flats of Britain in enormous quantities through the nineteenth century — the Burry Inlet at Penclawdd in South Wales, the Thames estuary around Leigh-on-Sea, Morecambe Bay — raked by hand, boiled at the shore, and sold by the pint from barrows and stalls. Being cheap and abundant, they turned up in cookery books less as a delicacy than as a way of putting savour into plain boiled white fish, which is exactly the job this sauce does: the liquor carries the sea flavour, the flour-and-butter base carries it onto the plate. Cassell's, aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, is careful to print the price per quart, as it does throughout. The convention of calling a flour-thickened butter sauce "melted butter" is a distinctly English usage that persisted through the Victorian period and had largely died out by the mid-twentieth century, which is why the recipe now reads oddly.