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Fish Stock, Brown
Cut into pieces a skate, a flounder, and two small eels. Fry them in butter a rich brown. Cover with water; add an onion stuck with cloves, three carrots, three turnips, a head of celery, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Boil to a jelly. This stock will keep two days. Strain for use. Time, two hours to boil.
A brown fumet built on gelatinous fish rather than bones, meant as the base for dark fish sauces and aspics. Most of what needs adjusting is the timing and the keeping.
- Two hours is too longFish frames and trimmings give everything they have in 20 to 40 minutes; past that they turn bitter and muddy. Simmer for half an hour, strain, then reduce the strained liquid hard to get the body the recipe means by "boil to a jelly."
- Where the jelly comes fromSkate is cartilaginous and eel skin is heavily collagenous, which probably accounts for their presence here; the flounder contributes flavour rather than body. If you substitute, keep something gelatinous in the pot: skate wings, sole or turbot frames, or a split pig's trotter if you are not bound to fish alone.
- Sourcing the fishCommon skate is critically endangered and is a prohibited species in EU waters, though most fishmonger 'skate' is thornback ray rather than the common skate; European eel is CITES-listed and heavily restricted, and even farmed eel is grown on from wild-caught juveniles. Check provenance, or drop the eel and lean on flatfish frames plus a longer reduction.
- Browning in butterWhole butter scorches before fish colours properly. Use clarified butter or a neutral oil, and let the fond build on the pan bottom; deglaze it into the stock or you lose most of the browning you paid for.
- SaltDo not salt a stock you intend to reduce to a jelly. Season the finished sauce instead.
- Quantities the original omits"Cover with water" means by about an inch; how much that is depends entirely on the size of your fish and your pan, none of which the recipe specifies. An onion stuck with cloves usually takes only a few cloves.
- Keeping"Will keep two days" assumes a cold larder rather than a refrigerator. Chill it fast in a shallow pan, refrigerate no more than three days, or freeze in ice-cube trays; reduced fish stock freezes well and thaws without splitting.
- YieldYield depends on how much water you used and how far you take the reduction; taken to the jelly stage you will finish with only a small quantity of syrupy glaze.
Cassell's belongs to the era when an English kitchen kept several distinct stocks running, and a brown fish stock served as a base for the dark fish sauces of the French repertoire that Victorian cooks had absorbed: sauce genevoise, matelote, and the wine-dark reductions served with turbot and salmon on fast days when a meat glaze would not do. The choice of skate and eel looks technical rather than decorative, since both are rich in collagen and yield a stock that sets firm when cold, which would also make it serviceable as the foundation for a fish aspic. Instructions of this kind assume a household with a cool larder and no refrigeration, which is why the keeping time is given in days rather than weeks.