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Fennel Sauce
Make some good melted butter in the proportion of an ounce and a half of butter, a dessert-spoonful of flour, and a wine-glassful of water. Blend the butter and flour together, reserving a little of the butter to stir in after it has thickened and been removed from the fire. Chop enough of fennel to fill a table-spoon, and put it with the butter when it is on the point of boiling. Do not let it boil, but simmer for a minute or two, then remove, and stir in the remaining butter. Serve in a tureen. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for five or six mackerel.
A late-Victorian English butter sauce, and the standard accompaniment to mackerel. The only tricky parts are the archaic measures and the instruction not to boil once the fennel is in.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn Victorian English cookery melted butter means butter thickened with flour and water — the plain ancestor of a modern white sauce. It is not clarified or simply liquefied butter.
- The measuresAn ounce and a half of butter is 3 tablespoons; a dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; a wine-glassful is roughly 2 fluid ounces, or a scant quarter cup. A tablespoon of chopped fennel is the finished chopped volume, not a whole sprig.
- ConsistencyThree tablespoons of butter to two ounces of water gives a very stiff, rich sauce by current taste. Loosening it with a little of the water the fish was cooked in, or with milk, brings it closer to a pouring sauce without changing its character.
- Which fennelThis means the feathery green fronds of the herb, chopped fine — not the sliced bulb of Florence fennel and not fennel seed. Dill fronds are the nearest substitute if fennel tops are unavailable.
- The hinge: no boiling after the fennel goes inBoiling dulls the fronds to a drab olive and drives off the aniseed aroma that is the whole point. A minute or two of bare simmering is enough to take the raw edge off.
- Reserved butter off the heatHolding back a portion of the butter and stirring it in away from the fire enriches and glosses the sauce; adding it over heat risks the emulsion breaking. Do it just before serving.
- YieldThe quantity given is meant for five or six whole mackerel — only some 3 to 4 fluid ounces of sauce, which is sparing by modern habits. Double it if you want a generous spoonful per plate.
- ServingA tureen keeps it warm at table; if you hold it in the pan, keep it below a simmer and stir before pouring, as a flour-thickened butter sauce skins over quickly.
Fennel and mackerel is one of the older fixed pairings in English cookery, on the same logic as gooseberry sauce for the same fish: something sharp or aromatic to cut the richness of an oily flesh that spoils fast. Herb-based butter sauces of this kind — parsley, fennel, egg — were the backbone of Victorian fish cookery, all built on the same base of flour, water and butter that Cassell's calls "melted butter". The costing of fourpence is typical of the Dictionary, which was written for households running to a budget and habitually told the cook what a dish should come to as well as how to make it; fennel was easily grown and often self-seeding in a kitchen garden.