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SKATE (a la Bourgeoisie)
Take two pounds of skate, wash it, and cut it into convenient pieces for serving. Take the trimmings and put them into a pan with rather less than a pint of water, bring to the boil, and skim; add an onion sliced and a bouquet garni, simmer half an hour, and strain. Heat one ounce and a half of butter, stir an ounce of flour into it, and let it brown, add the stock made from the trimmings, a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, a glass of white wine, and the pieces of skate. Season to taste, and simmer for a quarter of an hour or more, until the fish is cooked. Dish up, reduce the stock and strain it over the skate. Garnish with croutons of bread, and serve hot. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per pound.
A straightforward brown-sauce braise of the sort that filled the fish chapters of late Victorian household books. The main adjustments are the wine measure, the cooking time, and where the skate comes from.
- Buy the wing, and smell itSkate is sold as wings, on or off the cartilage; two pounds is one large wing or two small. Skate develops ammonia as it ages because of the urea in its flesh, so anything with a whiff of it should be rejected. Fishmongers traditionally held skate a day or two before selling, which softens the flesh and eases the skin off.
- TrimmingsThe "trimmings" are the thin cartilaginous edge of the wing and any skin and scraps. If you buy skinned, boned wing you will have nothing to make the stock with; ask for the trimmings, or substitute a light fish stock.
- A glass of white wineA Victorian wine glass is conventionally reckoned at roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz (60-75 ml). The 'rather less than a pint' of water is an imperial pint measure, 20 fl oz, so the reduced stock is the dominant liquid.
- The rouxLetting the ounce of flour brown in butter is the whole character of the sauce, and it wants three or four minutes of steady stirring over moderate heat to reach a nut colour. Add the hot stock in stages or it will lump.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is generous for skate. Thin wing pieces are done in 6 to 8 minutes, and thick centre-cut portions in about 10; the flesh should just come away from the cartilage in ribs. Held longer it turns woolly and begins to shed liquid into the sauce.
- Reducing at the endLift the fish out onto a warm dish, then boil the sauce hard to the consistency you want and strain it over. Do not reduce with the fish still in the pan, which is the commonest way to overcook it.
- CroutonsTriangles of bread fried in butter or clarified butter until crisp, added at the moment of serving so they do not soften in the sauce.
- SpeciesSeveral large skates, including the common skate, are now severely depleted and protected in some waters. Ask what you are buying; thornback ray is the usual sustainable substitute in Britain and cooks identically.
- YieldTwo pounds of wing serves four as a main course. The costing of 4d. to 6d. a pound is a period note, not a guide.
Skate was cheap fish in Victorian Britain, and Cassell's price note shows it: a few pence a pound at a time when prime turbot or salmon cost several times as much. The label a la bourgeoisie is French kitchen shorthand for plain household cooking rather than restaurant work, and the method here is exactly that — a brown roux, a fish stock made from the scraps, a splash of wine, and fried bread to give the plate some crispness. It belongs to a tradition in which the far better known skate au beurre noir, the black-butter treatment, dominated French handling of the fish. Skate's peculiar structure, ribbed cartilage instead of bones, made it easy to serve and easy to eat, which is part of why it turned up so often in the cheaper fish cookery of the period; it has since slid from everyday food to something closer to a delicacy.