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Sardine Sauce
Take eight sardines, and remove the bones. Make a butter sauce ready, with water or broth, of the ordinary thickness. In this boil the bones of the fish, a bay-leaf, and a finely-minced shallot, adding some pepper, nutmeg, or mace, and a little lemon-juice. When the sauce is properly flavoured, strain it, and add to it the fish chopped small.
A Victorian savoury sauce built on the trimmings as much as the fish. The whole point is the infusion: the bones, bay and shallot flavour the sauce, then come out before the fish goes in.
- Butter sauceIn this period the term means a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than simply butter melted in a pan; here it is made with water or broth rather than milk. The recipe specifies no quantities, so the working ratio and the volume of sauce are left to the cook.
- QuantitiesEight sardines is a generous amount of fish for a modest quantity of sauce; expect a thick, spoonable sauce rather than a thin one. Tin sizes and fish sizes vary too much for a fixed equivalent.
- Tinned versus freshThe recipe does not say which is meant. Tinned sardines have soft cooked bones that lift out easily; fresh ones need filleting, and the frames are worth a quick rinse before they go in the sauce.
- Infusing the bonesTen to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer extracts plenty. Longer turns the sauce bitter and fishy rather than deeper, and the shallot loses its edge.
- Strain properlyPush it through a fine sieve, not a colander. Small sardine bones are sharp enough to be unpleasant even when soft.
- Seasoning"pepper, nutmeg, or mace" offers a choice between nutmeg and mace rather than all of them together. Salt last of all, since tinned sardines and broth both carry plenty of it.
- Off the boil at the endAdd the chopped fish to the strained sauce over low heat just to warm through. Boiling breaks the flesh into fibres and the sauce turns grainy.
- ServingA sauce for grilled or boiled white fish, or spread on toast as a savoury. Use it the day it is made.
Tinned sardines, chiefly French, were widely available in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century and became a fixture of the late-Victorian breakfast and savoury course. The recipe demonstrates a principle rather than a dish: the frugal habit of extracting flavour from bones and trimmings into a plain butter sauce, then finishing with the flesh itself, which is the same logic behind lobster, anchovy and shrimp sauces. The strong aromatics -- bay, shallot, nutmeg or mace, lemon -- suit oily preserved fish, and such a sauce would have suited boiled cod, hake or turbot, or toast as a savoury at the end of dinner.