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Gobble Sauce for Fish
Put one ounce of butter into a saucepan, and mix it very smoothly with an ounce of flour. Add six table-spoonfuls of cream or new milk, a pinch of cayenne, two or three grates of nutmeg, a tea-spoonful of the essence of anchovies, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice. Stir in two table-spoonfuls of shelled shrimps, and serve quite hot, but the sauce must not boil. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for half a pint of sauce.
A small, rich shrimp-and-anchovy sauce built on a butter-flour roux — essentially a thin béchamel enriched with cream and seasoned hard. It comes together in under ten minutes.
- The hinge: no boilingThe instruction not to let it boil is the whole recipe. Once the anchovy essence and lemon juice are in, a boil will curdle the cream and toughen the shrimp into rubber. Keep it just below a simmer, at the point where it steams and thickens but does not bubble.
- Quantities in modern termsOne ounce each of butter and flour is about 2 tablespoons butter and close to 4 tablespoons flour. Six tablespoons of cream is only about a third of a cup, which cannot on its own make the half pint of sauce the recipe claims to yield, so expect to thin it considerably with more milk or a little fish cooking liquor.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the cow, richer than modern whole milk. Whole milk works; half-and-half is closer to the intended texture if you are not using cream.
- Essence of anchoviesA bottled Victorian staple: anchovies broken down with salt, vinegar and spice. Anchovy paste from a tube is the nearest thing — use about a teaspoon, or half a teaspoon of paste loosened with a little water, since modern paste is saltier and more concentrated.
- Shelled shrimpsThe original means the small brown shrimp sold cooked and peeled by the pint in Victorian Britain, not large prawns. Use cooked cold-water shrimp, whole; if only large shrimp are available, chop them small so the sauce still coats fish.
- Cook the flourLetting the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two before the milk goes in helps avoid a pasty taste. The recipe itself asks only that they be mixed "very smoothly" and says nothing about cooking the roux.
- Yield and servingHalf a pint here is an imperial half pint, about 10 fluid ounces or a cup and a quarter — enough for two to four portions of poached or boiled white fish, turbot, brill, cod or sole. Spoon it over at the table rather than cooking the fish in it.
- SeasoningNo salt is listed because the anchovy essence supplies it. Taste before adding any. The nutmeg should register faintly; two or three grates is a small amount deliberately.
The name is unexplained in the book itself, and no convincing origin for "gobble sauce" is documented — it may simply be a kitchen nickname for a sauce good enough to be eaten fast, and Victorian cookery books are full of such unglossed titles. What the recipe does show clearly is how an English household dressed plain boiled fish: a white roux sauce, cream, and a bought bottled flavouring. Anchovy essence was one of a family of commercial "store sauces" — alongside mushroom ketchup, Harvey's sauce and Worcestershire — that let cooks add savoury depth without keeping a stockpot going, and it appears throughout Cassell's. The costing, sixpence for half a pint, is characteristic of the book's practical bent: Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery seems to have been aimed at middle-class households running on a fixed weekly allowance, and nearly every entry carries a "probable cost", which would let the mistress of the house price a dinner before ordering it.