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Sauce for Freshwater Fish
Mince half a dozen mushrooms, half a dozen onions, and a clove of garlic. The latter may be omitted. Put the vegetables into a saucepan, pour over them as much stock as will cover them, and simmer gently till the sauce is pleasantly flavoured. Strain the liquor through a jelly-bag, and press with the back of a wooden spoon to obtain as much sauce as possible. Add a glass of claret, boil up once more, and serve. A few drops of anchovy essence may be added or not, as preferred, and the sauce may be thickened with brown thickening.
A straightforward vegetable-and-wine reduction of the kind Victorian kitchens kept on hand for pike, perch and trout. Two things need interpretation: the onion count and the thickening.
- Six onions is almost certainly six small onesSix onions against six mushrooms suggests small onions -- button or pickling onions, or what a modern cook would call shallots -- though the book does not say so. Six full-sized brown onions would swamp six mushrooms; something like 6 oz of onion or shallot against 6 oz of mushrooms keeps the balance.
- A glass of claretIn period cookery writing a wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 to 2.5 fl oz, not a modern tumbler. Claret means dry red Bordeaux, and any dry, moderately tannic red stands in.
- Which stockNone is specified. A light veal or chicken stock gives the smoothest result; fish stock keeps it in register with the dish but turns assertive once reduced. Enough to just cover the vegetables is about 1 to 1.5 cups.
- Brown thickeningThe usual term for flour cooked in butter until nut-coloured, made up in advance. A teaspoon or two of beurre manie whisked in at the end will thicken as quickly, though without the browned colour and flavour.
- The jelly-bagA fine sieve lined with a double layer of muslin, pressed with the spoon as directed. Pressing is the point here, not clarity, so do not treat it as a consomme strain.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty commercial anchovy extract. Anchovy paste thinned with a little of the hot sauce, or a small dash of Worcestershire, gives the same background savour. Add it after the wine and taste before salting.
- Simmering time"Till pleasantly flavoured" is about 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, which also softens the onion enough to give up its sugar. Do not boil hard or the mushroom flavour goes flat and muddy.
- YieldRoughly a cup of finished sauce, enough for four portions of fish. It reduces further with the final boil, so start with a little more stock than you think you need.
Sauces built on a strained bed of mushroom, onion and a little garlic, sharpened with red wine, resemble the French sauce genevoise and its relatives, long attached to river fish, especially salmon and pike, though no line of descent can be demonstrated. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class English households in the later nineteenth century, presents the idea stripped of its French apparatus: no fish fumet made from the bones, no mirepoix cut to size, simply mince, cover with stock, strain and finish with claret. The optional garlic and the optional anchovy essence are telling. Both were regarded as strong tastes in an English kitchen of the period, to be offered rather than assumed, and the anchovy in particular did the work that a long-reduced stock would do in a professional kitchen. Red wine with freshwater fish looks odd to modern eyes trained on white, but it seems to have been a general tendency with the muddier river species, where tannin and a browned thickening were thought to cut the earthiness of the flesh.