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Gooseberry Sauce, for Mackerel
Cut the tops and stalks from half a pint of green gooseberries. Boil them until tender, press them through a sieve, and mix them with half a pint of melted butter. Various seasonings are used for this sauce--such as grated ginger, or grated lemon-rind, grated nutmeg, a little pounded sugar, or cayenne pepper. A wine-glassful of sorrel or spinach-juice is a decided improvement. The gooseberries are often sent to table mashed and flavoured, without being mixed with the melted butter. Time, about forty minutes to prepare. Sufficient for a pint of sauce. Probable cost, 4d.
A classic English sharp sauce for oily fish, and one where a single term will mislead almost every modern reader: "melted butter" here is a thickened white sauce, not butter melted in a pan.
- "Melted butter" means a sauceIn Victorian usage melted butter is a flour-and-butter sauce — roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of water or light stock, whisked smooth and simmered a few minutes. Plain molten butter will not carry the gooseberry purée and will split; the flour is what holds it.
- Half a pint of gooseberriesMeasured by volume, not weight: half an imperial pint is about 10 fl oz of whole berries, roughly 8–9 oz / 250 g.
- Green gooseberriesHard, underripe, intensely acid fruit picked before sweetening — the acidity is the whole point against mackerel. Ripe dessert gooseberries make a sweet compote instead. Frozen green gooseberries work; if none are available, the sauce is not the same dish.
- Topping and tailing"Cut the tops and stalks" is the old topping and tailing: snip off both the dried flower end and the stem with scissors. Since the fruit goes through a sieve, this is less critical than in a recipe where the berries stay whole.
- Cooking and sievingBoil in barely enough water to keep them from catching, 8 to 10 minutes, until the skins burst and collapse. Push through a fine sieve rather than blitzing — the skins and pips are tough and a blender leaves gritty flecks.
- Sorrel or spinach juiceA wine-glassful is about 2 fl oz. Its job is colour and a second acid note; sorrel is the sharper of the two. Wilt the leaves briefly and press the liquid out, and add it off the heat, since prolonged boiling turns the green a dull olive.
- Choosing among the seasoningsThe list is alternatives, not a combined spice mix. Pick one: ginger or nutmeg for a warm version, lemon rind and cayenne for a sharp one, with sugar only in small pinches to take the edge off, never enough to sweeten.
- The forty minutesThat figure covers topping, boiling, sieving and making the butter sauce. Actual attention at the stove is closer to fifteen minutes.
- YieldA pint of sauce, enough for six to eight fillets of mackerel. The unthickened version — mashed and flavoured fruit alone — yields roughly half as much and is closer to a modern fruit relish.
Gooseberries with mackerel is one of the oldest surviving English fish-and-fruit pairings, and the logic is seasonal as well as culinary: the mackerel run and the green gooseberry crop coincide in late spring and early summer, and the fruit's sharpness cuts the oiliness of the fish in the same way lemon or sorrel does. The French name for the fruit, groseille à maquereau — literally mackerel currant — is traditionally taken to record the same partnership, though the derivation is not documented beyond that tradition. Cassell's places the recipe among its sauces alongside a whole family of "melted butter" derivatives: a flour-thickened base into which anything from capers to shrimp to fruit purée could be stirred, the workhorse of the nineteenth-century English kitchen before French velouté and hollandaise displaced it in ambitious households. The alternative given at the end, mashed and flavoured fruit sent up on its own, is the plainer form, and the one nearest to what is served with grilled mackerel today.