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Pike, Sauces For
Plain melted butter, brown caper sauce, Dutch sauce, piquant sauce, or anchovy sauce may all be served with pike. Or, if preferred, a sauce may be used prepared as follows. Mix a small tea-spoonful of flour with as much water as will make it into a smooth paste. Stir this into two ounces of clarified butter. Add a quarter of a pint of milk or cream and a small anchovy which has been freed from skin and bone and finely chopped. Stir the sauce over the fire until it is on the point of boiling, then add a table-spoonful of Indian soy, and a little salt and cayenne if necessary. Just before sending the sauce to table, stir into it a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Time, five minutes to boil the sauce. Probable cost, 5d., if made with milk. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian anchovy-and-soy sauce for a lean freshwater fish, built on a water-and-flour slurry rather than a roux. It comes together in about five minutes, so have everything measured before the pan goes on.
- Do not let it boil after the dairy goes inThe instruction is to stir "until it is on the point of boiling" and stop there. Cream with anchovy, soy and lemon juice in it will split if held at a rolling boil, and the lemon in particular should go in off the heat at the last moment.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or a generous half cup. American cooks working from a 16 oz pint should use 150 ml rather than 4 oz.
- Indian soyThis is soy sauce, sold in Victorian Britain under that name as an import by way of the East India trade. A tablespoon of a dark Chinese soy or a Japanese koikuchi is the closest match; it is the main source of salt in the sauce, so taste before adding any more.
- The anchovy"A small anchovy freed from skin and bone" implies a whole salt-cured fish, as anchovies were commonly sold in this period. Two oil-packed fillets, mashed to a paste, stand in for one; they will melt into the sauce if you crush them in the butter before the milk goes in.
- Flour and water, not a rouxA teaspoon of flour slaked in cold water and stirred into warm butter gives a very light body — this is closer to a thin pouring sauce than a béchamel. Give it a minute of gentle heat once the milk is in so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces is about 55-57 g. Clarified butter is what the recipe calls for, presumably so that milk solids do not catch and speck the sauce; ghee works, or melt butter gently and pour off the clear fat.
- Spoon sizesA Victorian dessert-spoon is roughly two teaspoons, so the lemon juice is about 10 ml. The tablespoon of soy is close enough to a modern one.
- YieldRoughly 200 ml of finished sauce, which the book puts at five or six servings -- two to three tablespoons each, in keeping with a rich accompaniment to the fish.
Pike is lean, bony and can carry a muddy note from still water, and English cookery books of the period generally pair it with a sharp or salty sauce: the recommended partners here -- caper, Dutch (hollandaise), piquant, anchovy -- are all sharp or salty enough to carry it. The compound sauce given at the end is a good snapshot of the late-Victorian store cupboard, where bottled "Indian soy" sat beside anchovy essence and cayenne among the standard savoury boosters, all of them descendants of the fish-sauce and soy imports that had reached Britain through the East India trade from the late seventeenth century onwards. Cassell's, published in London in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, was written for households that still bought whole freshwater fish from a river or a fishmonger's slab, and pike appears in its fish chapters in a way it no longer does in British cooking. The pairing of anchovy with soy and lemon is close to the flavour logic behind the bottled table sauces of the same era, assembled fresh in the pan instead of poured from a bottle.