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Herrings, Sauce For
Herrings are generally served without sauce. When fresh ones are cooked a little may be required, and then either parsley and butter, anchovy, or caper sauce may be sent to table with the fish; or the following sauce. Stir a table-spoonful of mixed mustard into a pint of melted butter. A table-spoonful of finely-chopped mixed pickles may be substituted for the mustard. Boil for five minutes, add a teaspoonful of vinegar, and serve. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A short mustard sauce for fresh herring, resting on one Victorian term that will mislead anyone who reads it literally.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn English cookery books of this period melted butter means a thickened butter sauce: roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of butter, then whisked with about a pint of water or milk and finished with more butter. Poured over a pint of actually-melted butter, a spoonful of mustard would simply split and slide off the fish.
- The pintCassell's is British, so a pint here is 20 fl oz, not 16. That makes a generous quantity of sauce for six; half the amount is plenty alongside a well-flavoured oily fish.
- Mixed mustardThis means mustard powder already slaked with water to a paste, not a jarred American-style condiment. English mustard powder mixed to a thin paste and left ten minutes to develop its heat is the closest thing.
- The five-minute boilThe recipe gives no reason for the boil; in a flour-thickened base it would help cook out any raw flour taste. Mustard loses pungency with heat, so if you want the sauce sharp, hold back half the mustard and stir it in off the heat.
- Mixed pickles as the variantVictorian mixed pickles were commonly cauliflower, cucumber, onion and green beans in spiced vinegar. Chopped cornichons with a little piccalilli give a fair approximation; drain them well or the sauce will thin.
- The vinegar at the endThe recipe adds it after the boiling, which would preserve more of its sharpness. A teaspoon in a pint reads timid to modern palates -- taste and add more, since the sauce is there to cut the oil of the herring.
- Probable cost, 3d.A reminder that this book was written for households keeping accounts. It has no bearing on the cooking, but it tells you the sauce was considered an economy: mustard, flour and butter against a fish that was among the cheapest in the market.
Herring was the everyday fish of the British and northern European table, landed in enormous quantities and eaten fresh near the coast, salted or smoked everywhere else. Cassell's opens by noting that herrings are usually sent to table with no sauce at all, which reflects both the fish's own richness and its position as plain food rather than dinner-party fare. Mustard with oily fish is a long-standing pairing across northern Europe -- it appears with herring, mackerel and eel alike -- and the logic is straightforward: the pungency and acidity cut through fat that would otherwise cloy. The base sauce, the flour-thickened "melted butter" that carries the mustard here, was the workhorse of nineteenth-century English cookery, criticised by French-trained cooks and defended by household economists, and it turns up in these dictionaries under a dozen different names depending on what was stirred into it.