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Genoese Sauce for Fish
Make half a pint of good brown sauce, thickened with a little flour and butter. Put it into a saucepan, and stir into it a table-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, a table-spoonful of port, twenty drops of the essence of anchovies, a dessert-spoonful of walnut ketchup, and as much pounded mace as will stand on a three-penny piece. Boil for five or six minutes, stirring all the time, and serve in a tureen. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, exclusive of the port, 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient for rather more than half a pint of sauce.
A Victorian fish sauce built on brown sauce rather than butter, so it depends entirely on the quality of the base. Two of its five flavourings are no longer sold in most shops, and both have straightforward stand-ins.
- The base is the whole dish"Good brown sauce" here means a proper espagnole or a reduced meat gravy, not a bottled brown table sauce of the HP type. If your base is thin or floury the seasonings will not rescue it; reduce it first, then judge how much anchovy it needs.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The note at the end that it makes "rather more than half a pint" simply acknowledges the added liquids.
- Spoon sizesA Victorian dessert-spoon is roughly 2 teaspoons; a table-spoon is close to the modern one, though older English spoons ran a little larger. Measure by taste rather than exactly.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin, salty commercial extract, sold in bottles and dosed in drops. Twenty drops is about ¼ teaspoon. Anchovy paste from a tube, colatura di alici, or a mashed salt-packed fillet all substitute; start with less, as modern pastes are more concentrated and saltier.
- Walnut ketchupA dark, spiced liquor made from green walnuts, tart and faintly bitter, still made by a few British producers. Worcestershire sauce or mushroom ketchup is the usual replacement, using slightly less if you choose Worcestershire, which is sharper.
- As much mace as will stand on a three-penny pieceThe silver threepence was about 16 mm across, so this is a small pinch — call it ⅛ teaspoon of ground mace. Ground mace loses its perfume quickly; if yours has been open a year, use a fresh jar or grate a little nutmeg instead.
- When to add the portFive or six minutes of boiling drives off some of the alcohol and much of the wine's aroma. If you want the port to read as port, stir half in at the start and the rest off the heat at the end.
- ParsleyAdd the parsley in the last minute rather than boiling it for six, or it will turn drab and taste hayish. Flat-leaf or curly both work; mince it fine so it suspends in the sauce.
- Yield and servingAbout 1¼ cups, enough for four to six small portions of turbot, brill, cod or any firm white fish. Serve it hot in a warmed jug — it thickens and skins over quickly as it cools.
Genoese or "Genoise" sauce in nineteenth-century English cookery has little to do with the cooking of Genoa; the name is often said to be a corruption of sauce genevoise, after Geneva, and it attached itself to a family of dark, wine-and-anchovy fish sauces whose label English compilers copied without much scrutiny. What it really shows is the Victorian fondness for building fish sauces on brown meat stock, a habit later French practice largely abandoned in favour of fish fumet and butter. The two bottled flavourings — essence of anchovies and walnut ketchup — were staples of the mid-century store cupboard, descendants of the older English tradition of long-keeping savoury liquors that predated commercial stock cubes and did much the same job. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery gives a "probable cost" for each receipt: sixpence for this quantity, port excluded, marks it as an everyday sauce dressed up with a splash of something from the decanter.