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Oyster and Shrimp Sauce
Put half a pint of BROWN SAUCE in a pan, with a gill of strained oyster liquor and the beards of six oysters, first pounded with a strip of lemon rind. Add a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence, a few drops of lemon-juice, salt and cayenne to taste, a sprig of parsley, and a morsel of mace; boil for twenty minutes, then strain. Put it back in the pan with a table-spoonful of fish stock or good white stock, and half a gill of freshly shelled shrimps; cover for a few minutes, then add six oysters cut into dice. Cover again until just heated through (not boiled), and serve hot with fish or beef steaks.
A compound sauce built on the book's own brown sauce, flavoured twice over: first by simmering and straining out the oyster trimmings, then by finishing with whole shrimps and diced oysters. Everything hinges on that finish staying below a boil.
- The hinge: no boiling at the endOnce the diced oysters go in, the pan comes off the heat or sits barely at a bare steam. Oysters seize and turn rubbery within a minute of boiling, and the sauce is meant to carry them soft.
- Gills and half pintsA gill is a quarter pint, so about 5 fl oz (a generous half cup) in the imperial measures this book uses; half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz, a generous quarter cup. Half a pint of brown sauce is 10 fl oz, roughly 1 1/4 cups.
- Brown sauceThis is the book's own brown sauce, made in the espagnole manner: a brown roux moistened with stock and reduced; see its own entry for the details. Any well-reduced brown stock sauce works; a bottled brown table sauce is a different thing entirely and will wreck the balance.
- BeardsThe beard is the dark frill of gill and mantle trimmed off a shucked oyster. Pounded and simmered they give depth, then get strained out. If your oysters come already trimmed, add a little extra oyster liquor instead.
- Oyster liquorStrain it through muslin or a fine sieve; shell grit is the usual fault in this sauce. Bottled clam juice is a reasonable stand-in for volume, though saltier, so hold back on the added salt.
- Anchovy essenceA thin Victorian anchovy extract. Use about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a spoon of stock, or a teaspoon of colatura, and taste before adding more salt.
- MaceA morsel means a small fragment of a blade of mace, not ground; the amount is left to the cook. Ground mace can stand in at a pinch, added at the end of the simmer since it will not strain out.
- Shrimps'Freshly shelled shrimps' most likely means the small cooked shrimp of English fishmongers, sold boiled. Use small cooked cold-water shrimp and simply warm them; larger raw prawns need chopping and a minute longer, and change the character of the sauce.
- YieldFifteen fluid ounces of liquid go into the pan and boil for twenty minutes, so the strained quantity depends on how hard it reduces; enough for about four servings of fish or steak. It does not reheat well once the shellfish are in.
Oyster and shrimp sauces were the standard English accompaniment to boiled and baked fish through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when oysters were cheap enough to be thickening and seasoning rather than luxury. The instruction to serve it with beef steaks is not a Victorian eccentricity but the older habit that survives in steak and oyster pudding and in the oyster-stuffed beef of eighteenth-century cookery; oyster liquor was valued much as anchovy and mushroom ketchups were, as a savoury depth-giver for meat. The pounding of the beards with lemon rind is a small piece of thrift typical of the period, extracting flavour from the part of the oyster the diner would not be given.