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Red Mullet, Sauce For
Red mullet fried or boiled are very good without sauce. When this is required, however, plain melted butter, Dutch sauce, anchovy sauce, or Italian sauce is the most suitable, or a sauce may be prepared as follows. Rub the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs to a paste, and with them two ounces of clarified butter, a salt-spoonful of unmixed mustard, a dessert-spoonful of dried flour, a tea-spoonful of vinegar or lemon-juice, and a little pepper and salt. Mix with this paste a third of a pint of cold water, put the mixture into a saucepan, and stir over the fire till it boils. Throw in a dessert-spoonful of finely-shredded parsley, let the sauce boil once more, and serve. A sauce for baked mullet may be made according to the directions given in the recipe for
An egg-yolk and flour sauce of the mid-Victorian type, closer to a warm mustard mayonnaise cooked to thickness than to any modern butter sauce. The measures are British imperial and a few of the ingredient names have shifted.
- The hinge: work the paste smooth firstThe yolks, butter and flour must be rubbed to a genuinely smooth paste before any water goes near them. Add the water in a thin stream while stirring; tipped in at once, the flour seizes into lumps that no amount of boiling will disperse.
- MeasuresA third of an imperial pint is a generous cup, about 190 ml. A salt-spoonful is roughly teaspoon, a dessert-spoonful about 2 teaspoons, a teaspoon much the same as ours.
- "Unmixed mustard"Dry mustard powder, not the made-up paste in a jar. If you substitute prepared mustard, use about three times the volume and reduce the vinegar, since prepared mustard is already acidulated.
- "Dried flour"Flour dried out until it loses its raw dampness, a step some Victorian recipes call for; flour was stored loose in a bin and took up moisture. Ordinary all-purpose flour needs no such treatment.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons; since the recipe calls for two ounces of butter already clarified, start with a little more whole butter to end up with that much.
- Boiling is intentionalUnlike an egg-thickened sauce, this one relies on cooked flour for body, and the yolks are already hard-boiled, so bringing it to a boil will not curdle it. Give it a minute at the boil to lose the raw-flour taste.
- The sauces named in the first line"Plain melted butter" in a British book of this date means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply melted butter. "Dutch sauce" is the older English name for what we now call hollandaise.
- YieldRoughly a cup of sauce. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so thin with a spoonful of hot water if it stands before serving.
Red mullet was one of the most admired fish on the Victorian table, sold at a premium and often cooked whole in an oiled paper case so that nothing of its flavour escaped, with the liver left in and eaten as a delicacy. That reputation explains the opening sentence here: the fish was thought good enough to need no sauce at all, and alternatives are offered only "when this is required." The fish carried classical prestige too, being generally identified with the mullus that Roman writers described as fetching absurd prices. The sauce itself belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century English sauces built on hard-boiled yolks, mustard and vinegar, thickened with flour rather than emulsified, an approach that gave a cook a stable, reheatable sauce without the risk of a broken hollandaise.