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SKATE (a la St. Menehould)
Cut the skate into neat pieces, and simmer it in white sauce till done enough. Lay the fish on a dish, sprinkle seasoned bread-crumbs over it and a little grated Parmesan or Cheshire cheese. Put it in a brisk oven, or before the fire, till the surface is brightly browned, and serve hot. SKATE (au beurre noir), an excellent dish.
Take about two pounds of white skate, wash it, and boil it in water with salt and a little vinegar; five minutes before it is done enough, put the liver in with it, and boil it also. Take up the fish, skin it on both sides, lay it on a hot dish, and keep it hot for a few minutes. Dissolve six ounces of fresh butter in a saucepan, and stir it over a brisk fire till it is brown without being burnt. Throw about fifty leaves of picked parsley into it, and when these are crisp pour the butter over the fish. Put a large wine-glassful of common vinegar into the saucepan with a little pepper and salt. Let it boil for half a minute, pour it also over the fish, and serve very hot. Time altogether, about half an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons.
Two treatments of skate in one entry: a breadcrumbed gratin and the classic au beurre noir. Both are quick, and both depend entirely on the fish being genuinely fresh.
- Freshness is the hingeSkate carries urea in its flesh, which converts to ammonia as it ages. If the wing smells of ammonia when raw, it will taste of it cooked, and no amount of vinegar or browned butter will hide it. Fish two or three days off the boat is actually preferable to same-day skate, which can be tough, but anything with a sharp smell should be rejected.
- What to buyAsk for skate wing, filleted or on the cartilage. Common skate (Dipturus batis) is critically endangered and no longer legally landed in EU and UK waters; what is sold today is generally thornback ray or a similar managed species. Two pounds of wing serves four.
- "White skate"Here this probably means the pale, thick-fleshed wing rather than a distinct species, though "white skate" was also in use as a species name in the period. How Victorian fishmongers separated white from grey or brown skate is not clearly documented.
- The liverSkate liver is a delicacy in France but is almost never sold with the wing in Britain or the United States. Omit it without loss; if a fishmonger can supply it, poach it briefly and serve it alongside.
- "A brisk oven"425-450F. For the gratin, the fish is already cooked through, so this is purely a browning step of three to five minutes; a broiler element does the same job faster. "Before the fire" was the open-hearth equivalent.
- Cooking timeHalf an hour is the total for the dish, not the boiling. Skate wing poaches in eight to twelve minutes depending on thickness, and is done when the flesh lifts cleanly off the cartilage in ridged strands. Held longer it collapses into shreds.
- Beurre noirModern practice usually stops the butter at hazelnut brown (beurre noisette), well short of black; scorched butter is bitter, though the dish itself keeps the name beurre noir. Six ounces for four is generous by current taste and can be halved. The parsley must be bone dry before it goes in, and "fifty leaves" is simply a large handful of flat-leaf picked from the stems.
- The vinegarA wineglassful in Victorian recipes is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so a large one is perhaps 3; either way it is a great deal of vinegar by modern palates, and 2 tablespoons of wine vinegar reduced by half is closer to what a contemporary cook would pour. Add it off the heat first, then return the pan, as it will spit violently into hot butter.
- Cheshire cheeseA crumbly, salty, mild cow's-milk cheese from the English northwest. It grates poorly because it crumbles; a firm aged Cheshire or a Lancashire works, and Parmesan is the more reliable option the recipe already offers.
Skate was cheap fish in Victorian Britain, plentiful and coarse enough that cookery writers felt obliged to argue for it, and Cassell's stops to call the second version "an excellent dish." Raie au beurre noir is one of the settled classics of French bourgeois cooking, and its logic is sound: the browned butter supplies richness that the lean, faintly gelatinous flesh lacks, and the vinegar cuts both the butter and any residual ammoniacal edge in the fish. The name of the first version points to Sainte-Menehould in the Argonne, a town whose culinary reputation rests on long-cooked pigs' trotters finished in breadcrumbs and browned; by the nineteenth century "à la Sainte-Menehould" seems to have loosened from the trotter, and is often said to have served in French and English kitchens as shorthand for anything cooked through, coated in seasoned crumbs, and browned hard at the last moment. Cassell's, compiled for households that wanted French technique without French expense, applies it here to one of the cheapest fish on the slab.