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Naples Sauce for Fish
Put into an enamelled saucepan one-eighth of a pint of freshly boiled shrimps from which the shells have been removed, and with them a large anchovy, freed entirely from skin and bone, two shallots finely minced, a dessert-spoonful of bruised capers, and three dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice: a little piece of garlic not larger than a small pea can also be put in if the flavour is liked. Stir over the fire for six or seven minutes, pour in a quarter of a pint of good stock, and add a small pinch of cayenne and half a blade of mace. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, thicken the sauce with a piece of butter, the size of a large egg, rolled thickly in flour, and boil ten minutes longer. Strain the sauce, adding another dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice; make it as hot as possible without letting it boil, then draw it from the fire, and stir in a quarter of a pint of thick cream. Serve at once. Time, three-quarters of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A strained shellfish sauce in the older English manner: the solids do all the flavouring work and are then discarded. Two things decide whether it succeeds — a non-reactive pan, and holding the cream back from the boil.
- The hinge: cream goes in off the heatOnce the cream is added the sauce must not boil, or the acid from three to four dessert-spoonfuls of lemon juice will curdle it. Bring the strained sauce to just below simmering, pull it off the flame, then stir the cream in.
- Why enamelledThe lemon juice, capers and anchovy make this sauce sharply acidic. Untinned copper or bare cast iron will give it a metallic taste and a grey cast; use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Archaic measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons. One-eighth of an imperial pint is about 2 1/2 fl oz, roughly a third of a cup of peeled shrimp; a quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, or two-thirds of a cup, for both the stock and the cream.
- Butter the size of a large eggAround 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Rolled thickly in flour it takes up perhaps 2 tablespoons of flour — effectively a beurre manié, and the ten minutes of boiling that follows would serve to cook out the raw flour taste as much as to reduce the sauce.
- ShrimpsThe intended shellfish are small brown or pink shrimp, boiled in the shell and picked. Cooked cold-water shrimp from the fish counter work; a handful of shell-on prawns, briefly boiled and peeled, works better, and the shells can be simmered into the stock.
- Anchovy and mace"A large anchovy" means a whole salted fish, skinned and boned — two or three oil-packed fillets, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste, stand in. Half a blade of mace is no more than a quarter-teaspoon of ground mace, though whole blade is easier to strain out.
- The stockThe recipe says only "good stock"; fish stock suits the dish best. A light chicken stock will pass; anything heavily reduced or salted will overwhelm the shrimp, since the anchovy and capers are already bringing salt.
- Yield and servingEnough for six, spooned over poached or grilled white fish — turbot, brill, cod, halibut. It finishes thick enough to coat and does not hold well; make it while the fish cooks.
Cassell's, like most Victorian household encyclopaedias, catalogued sauces by place-name with only a loose regard for geography: a sauce called Naples, Genoese or Italian need not have had any documented origin in the place it was named for. What the recipe really shows is a hybrid moment in English cooking — the French method of building on stock and thickening with beurre manié, applied to the older English shellfish-and-anchovy tradition that had been dressing boiled fish since the eighteenth century. The pea-sized scrap of garlic, offered conditionally "if the flavour is liked," is a fair measure of how cautiously British middle-class kitchens still seem to have treated it in this period. The costing in pence was aimed at a housekeeper answerable for the week's accounts; tenpence for a sauce serving six placed this firmly among the small luxuries.