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Pike, Matelote Sauce For
Put a tea-spoonful of sugar into a stewpan, and place it over a quick fire. When it has dissolved, and is beginning to colour, put with it two ounces of fresh butter, and about twenty-five small button onions. Shake these over the fire until they are brown, then add a dessert-spoonful of flour, a glass of claret, and, gradually, a pint of water or stock. Stir the sauce till it boils, then put with it a bunch of sweet herbs, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and a lump of sugar. Simmer gently, and skim carefully until the sauce is thick and smooth, and the flavour is drawn out of the herbs; then stir into it a table-spoonful of essence of anchovy, half a tea-spoonful of Bovril, and two or three drops of browning if the sauce is not sufficiently coloured. A few oysters or mushrooms will improve this sauce. Time to simmer, half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 8d. Sufficient for a large pike.
A red-wine onion sauce built on a caramel base, meant to be poured over a whole baked or boiled pike. The caramel at the start is the step that decides whether it works.
- The caramel is the hingeA teaspoon of sugar melted in a dry pan over a "quick fire" (medium-high) goes from amber to acrid in seconds, and burnt caramel cannot be rescued. Pull the pan off the heat as soon as it takes colour, then add the butter to stop the cooking.
- A glass of claretIn Victorian recipe books a wineglassful is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, though some sources allow up to 4, so treat this as a small pour rather than a fixed measure. Claret means dry red Bordeaux; any dry, unoaked red does the job.
- Button onionsTwenty-five small button onions is roughly 8 oz of pearl or small pickling onions, peeled and left whole. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save a tedious job, but thaw and dry them or they will not brown.
- Essence of anchovyA thin, salty Victorian bottled extract. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a teaspoon of colatura, gives the same effect; a tablespoon of paste straight from the tube will be too strong and too thick.
- BovrilConcentrated beef extract, still sold. Yeast extracts such as Marmite are not interchangeable — they are sharper and more bitter. If you have used beef stock rather than water, skip it altogether.
- BrowningGravy browning: caramel colouring sold for darkening sauces. Purely cosmetic, and easily omitted.
- The optional oystersIf you add oysters, slip them in with their liquor during the last minute or two off the boil. Half an hour of simmering, as the sauce itself gets, would render them rubbery.
- Salt and seasoning orderAnchovy essence and Bovril are both very salty. Add the initial teaspoon of salt sparingly, or hold it back and season only at the end.
- YieldStarting from a pint of liquid and reduced to a thick, smooth sauce, this gives roughly 1½ to 2 cups — enough for a whole large fish serving six to eight, or for two to three pounds of fish fillets.
Matelote takes its name from the French matelot, sailor or bargeman, and the term traditionally describes a freshwater fish stew simmered in wine with onions and herbs — the kind of dish associated with river inns, where the catch was whatever came out of the water that morning. Cassell's has turned the stew into a sauce, keeping its defining trio of red wine, glazed button onions and a bunch of sweet herbs, and pouring it over a fish cooked separately. Pike earns its own entry as a freshwater fish that was bony and rather dry; a rich, dark, anchovy-sharpened sauce was one common way of dealing with it. The bottled shortcuts here — essence of anchovy, Bovril, browning — suggest an era when commercial extracts had reached the domestic kitchen and were treated as legitimate seasonings rather than as compromises.