Home › The Principles of Cookery › Genoa Sauce for Fish
Genoa Sauce for Fish
Pound smoothly in a mortar half a clove of garlic, three dessert-spoonfuls of capers, a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder, a tea-spoonful of raw mustard, and six boned anchovies. When thoroughly mixed, add four table-spoonfuls of sherry, a small tumblerful of cold water, and three table-spoonfuls of vinegar. Boil all together in a saucepan, and mix in half a pint of good melted butter. Time, a quarter of an hour to boil. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for one pint of sauce.
A sharp, salty pounded sauce of the sort Victorian kitchens kept for boiled or fried white fish. Two things in the text will mislead a modern cook: "melted butter" and the fifteen-minute boil.
- "Melted butter" means a flour sauceIn English cookery books of this period melted butter is a thickened sauce made with butter, flour and water or milk, roughly the consistency of a thin béchamel. Half a pint of plain liquid butter here would split and be inedible; make a half-pint (US: 1 1/4 cups) of basic white butter sauce instead.
- Boil the aromatics, not the finished sauceThe quarter of an hour applies to the wine, water and vinegar with the pounded paste, reducing and taking the raw edge off the garlic, mustard and curry powder. Once the butter sauce goes in, keep it below a simmer or the emulsion breaks and the flour tastes pasty.
- AnchoviesSix boned anchovies means six whole salted fish, filleted and rinsed, which is about twelve of the tinned fillets sold today. Rinse them if they are packed in heavy salt, and taste before adding any further seasoning.
- A small tumblerfulAmbiguous, but a small Victorian tumbler runs roughly 6 to 8 fl oz (3/4 to 1 cup). The recipe is meant to finish at a pint, so use the smaller amount and adjust.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Three of them of capers is about 2 tablespoons; drain and chop them if you are not using a mortar.
- Curry-powder and raw mustardCurry powder in a British Victorian pantry was generally built on turmeric and coriander, though blends varied widely and many included cayenne or long pepper, so it was not necessarily mild. "Raw mustard" here most likely means dry mustard powder, added unmixed so it hydrates in the sauce.
- Working without a mortarA small food processor or a stick blender in a jug will do the pounding, but the paste should be genuinely smooth before any liquid goes in, or the garlic stays in gritty specks.
- Yield and servingOne pint, enough for eight to ten servings alongside boiled cod, hake, skate or fried plaice. It is assertive, so serve it in a boat rather than napping the fish.
English cookery books of the nineteenth century used "Genoa" or "Genoese" loosely for sauces presented as being in the Italian manner, which here means garlic, anchovy, capers and vinegar. The recipe's format -- "Time", "Probable cost", "Sufficient for" -- is that of the mid-Victorian household dictionaries of cookery compiled for middle-class readers, and the curry powder shows how freely such a sauce could be adapted: an Italianate base built on a thickened butter sauce, spiced from the imperial pantry. The costing in pence, given as a matter of course throughout the book, is a reminder that these volumes were bought by people running a kitchen to a budget, where a pint of good sauce for eightpence was a figure worth printing.