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HERRINGS, SAUCE OF, FOR FISH (a German recipe)
Put an ounce of butter into a stewpan with two finely-minced shallots. Let them remain over a gentle fire until tender, then thicken with a table-spoonful of flour, and, when smooth, add half a pint of fish stock or water, a teaspoonful of vinegar, half a salt-spoonful of pepper, and two bay-leaves. Simmer gently for ten minutes. Strain the sauce, and mix with it the flesh of a salted and soaked herring, finely minced, and an ounce of butter. Boil once more. Just before serving, and when the sauce is slightly cooled, mix in the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A brown butter-and-flour sauce sharpened with salt herring and finished with egg yolks, meant to be spooned over plain boiled or poached white fish. The whole thing turns on how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks are in, the sauce must not boil again or it will curdle into scrambled egg. Let it drop off the boil for a minute, whisk a ladle of the hot sauce into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan and warm it gently, stirring, until it thickens slightly — around 160-170F. Serve at once; it will not hold or reheat.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups. The finished sauce should coat a spoon; if the herring and yolks stiffen it too far, loosen with a spoonful more stock.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so "half a salt-spoonful" of pepper is about an eighth of a teaspoon. Season the finished sauce properly at the end instead — the herring brings most of the salt.
- Salted and soaked herringBarrel-salted herring, not the modern vinegar-cured rollmop or the sweet-cured matjes. If you use salt herring, soak the fillets in cold water 4-12 hours with two or three changes, taste a scrap for salt, then mince. A jarred matjes fillet works but is sweeter and already soft; skip the soaking and cut the sugar elsewhere by using a little more vinegar.
- StewpanA plain saucepan. The butter-and-shallot stage should stay pale and soft rather than browning, so keep the heat low and give it five minutes or so.
- Fish stockWater works, as the recipe allows, but the sauce depends almost entirely on the herring for savour if you use it. A light fish fumet or the poaching liquor from the fish you are serving is much better; avoid strong shellfish stock, which fights the herring.
- StrainingThe strain removes the shallot and bay before the herring goes in, so the finished sauce carries only the fish. If you would rather keep the shallot, fish out the bay leaves and leave the rest.
- Yield and servingEnough for four or five as a sauce, not a dish in itself. It suits cod, haddock, hake or boiled potatoes; it is too assertive for delicate sole.
Salt herring sauces of this kind run right through northern European cooking — German, Dutch, Danish and Baltic kitchens all had versions in which a cured fish was used less as a dish than as a seasoning, the way anchovy was used in Britain. Cassell's Dictionary collected foreign recipes freely and labelled them by nationality, part of a late-Victorian appetite for continental cookery. The costing is the telling detail: sixpence for a sauce serving five, at a time when barrel herring was among the cheapest animal protein in Europe, salted in quantity in the North Sea and Baltic fisheries and shipped inland to households that would never see a fresh one. The egg-yolk finish, meanwhile, is a French technique — a liaison grafted onto a cheap cured ingredient.