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Salmon Trout, Sauce For
Take one or two slices of uncooked ham, an onion cut into four, four cloves, a little pepper, a shallot, and an ounce of butter. Put them into a saucepan, and set over a slow fire for a few minutes, then add a table-spoonful of flour and some good stock. Add a glass of red wine, a small lump of sugar, a little salt, and six anchovies, previously washed and scraped. Let the sauce boil, and pass it through a tamis, then serve with salmon trout or eels.
A brown wine-and-anchovy sauce of the old school, built on raw ham rather than a roux alone. The instructions assume you already know how a stock-based sauce behaves, so the notes below fill in the vessels, quantities and one point of technique that decides whether it works.
- TamisA tamis is a drum-shaped sieve of woven horsehair or fine cloth through which sauces were pushed with a wooden spoon. A fine-mesh conical strainer does the same job; press the solids firmly to extract the flavour rather than simply pouring off the liquid.
- "A glass of red wine"In Victorian cookery books a wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, roughly 1/4 cup. Use a dry red with some body; the small lump of sugar would have taken the edge off the wine rather than sweetening the sauce.
- Uncooked hamThis means raw cured ham, closer to prosciutto or a piece of green gammon than to sliced sandwich ham. Its purpose is salt and savour rendered into the butter, so a thick slice or an end trimming works better than thin cuts.
- AnchoviesSalted anchovies packed in barrels needed washing and their bones scraped away. Modern oil-packed fillets need only draining; six whole salted anchovies correspond to about twelve fillets, and they will largely break down into the sauce during the boil, with any remnants caught by the tamis.
- The hinge: the slow startThe ham, onion, cloves and shallot sweat in butter over low heat to draw out flavour without colouring the butter. If the pan gets hot enough to brown the onion hard, the finished sauce turns bitter and the flour will taste scorched.
- Flour and stockOne tablespoon of flour will thicken roughly a cup to a cup and a half of stock to a light coating consistency. Add the stock gradually and whisk, then simmer at least ten minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- SaltHam plus six anchovies plus reduced stock is already salty. Hold back the added salt until after straining and taste then.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much stock to use, so the yield is open; with a cup or so of stock it makes roughly a cup of finished sauce. It reheats well and thickens as it stands; loosen with a spoonful of stock.
Salmon trout and eels are both oily enough to carry a dark, wine-based sauce that would overwhelm sole or whiting. The combination of red wine, anchovy and a lump of sugar belongs to an older English and French taste for sauces that are simultaneously salt, sour and sweet, a taste also visible in the anchovy-laced "fish gravies" of eighteenth-century cookery and, later, in bottled sauces such as Worcestershire. Anchovy essence and salted anchovies were staple pantry items in Victorian kitchens because they gave a sauce depth without announcing themselves as fish; the ham serves the same purpose from the other direction. Salmon trout, the sea-run brown trout sold in British fishmongers under that name, was a fashionable and comparatively expensive fish, while eels were cheap and plentiful in London.