Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gravy for Baked Fish
Gravy for Baked Fish
After the fish is cooked, remove it from the baking-dish, and put it on a hot dish; pour the fat from the baking-tin into a saucepan, and add a little browned flour. Then pour in water or stock from the fish-trimmings, with enough Bovril to colour and flavour it well. Add a spoonful of Worcester, tomato, or any other approved sauce or ketchup. Boil up and strain round the fish. Vinegar from bottled capers, with a tea-spoonful of chopped capers in addition, provides an alternative flavouring which will be generally liked.
A working pan gravy built from whatever the baking dish leaves behind. It rewards a properly reduced fish stock and punishes a heavy hand with the flour.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a low oven until nut-coloured — a Victorian shortcut for depth of colour without long cooking. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so allow about half again as much, or make a conventional roux with the fish fat and accept a paler sauce.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. For gravy to serve four, work to roughly 1 tablespoon fat, 1 heaped tablespoon browned flour and 300 ml (1¼ cups) liquid; add liquid gradually and stop when it coats a spoon.
- BovrilStill sold, still beef-based. The recipe asks for 'enough to colour and flavour it well', so add it a little at a time and taste. Fish sauce, a dash of soy, or a spoonful of concentrated fish stock does the same job without putting beef into a fish sauce.
- Stock from the fish-trimmingsHead, bones and skin simmered about 20 minutes; fish stock is conventionally kept short, longer simmering being generally held to turn it bitter and gluey. Strain before use; the gravy is strained again at the end but grit will not remove itself.
- "Approved sauce or ketchup"In late-Victorian usage this means the bottled commercial sauces of the day — Worcestershire, mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, tomato. Mushroom ketchup is the closest thing to the intended savoury note; modern tomato ketchup brings sugar with it, so use less.
- Boil up and strainA brief hard boil is wanted to cook out the raw flour taste and to let the flour swell fully. Strain through a fine sieve, then pour it around the fish rather than over it, so the baked surface stays dry.
- The caper versionCaper vinegar is sharp; add it off the heat, a teaspoon at a time, tasting as you go. The chopped capers go in at the very end and after straining, or they will be sieved out.
This is a page from the era when the bottled sauce shelf became part of everyday English cookery. Bovril, Worcestershire sauce, mushroom and walnut ketchups and bottled capers were all in wide domestic use by the late Victorian period, and Cassell's treats them as pantry staples rather than novelties — a cook is expected to reach for "any other approved sauce or ketchup" without further guidance. The technique underneath is much older: deglaze the roasting tin, thicken with browned flour, moisten with a stock made from the trimmings of the same fish. Browned flour in particular was a standing preparation in Victorian kitchens, kept in a jar and used wherever a brown sauce was wanted quickly, at a time when a proper espagnole meant hours of simmering. That a fish gravy should be coloured and flavoured with a beef extract says something about period taste, which valued a savoury brown sauce over any particular loyalty to the main ingredient.