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Skate, Boiled in Stock
Skin a skate, and cut it into square pieces. Take as much stock in which fish has been boiled, or veal stock, as will cover the skate, and simmer it gently for an hour with the trimmings of the fish, the shell of a lobster or crab thoroughly cleansed, a bunch of sweet herbs, and two or three sliced onions. Strain and thicken the stock with brown thickening, and add pepper and salt, a little ketchup and soy, and a glass of claret. Put in the skate, and boil it until done. Serve it with the sauce poured over. Time to boil the skate, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per pound.
A Victorian braise dressed as a boil: the fish poaches in a fortified, thickened fish stock that becomes its own sauce. Two things need adjusting — the cooking time and the vocabulary.
- The hinge: cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes will reduce skate to shreds. Pieces of ordinary thickness are done in 6-10 minutes in barely-trembling liquid, when the flesh slips cleanly off the cartilage in ribs. The longer time in the original may assume a much thicker wing than most fishmongers now sell.
- Buying and skinningSkinning a whole skate is a job for a fishmonger with a stiff knife; ask for skinned wings and keep the trimmings for the stock. Skate should smell of the sea — a strong ammonia note means the urea in its flesh has broken down and the fish is past use.
- Brown thickeningThis is Victorian shorthand for a brown roux, flour cooked in butter or dripping until it is the colour of a hazelnut. Reckon on about 1 oz each of butter and flour per pint of stock, and cook the flour out properly or the sauce tastes raw.
- Ketchup and soyNeither means what it means now. "Ketchup" in this book is mushroom or walnut ketchup, thin, dark and salty; "soy" is imported soy sauce, used a teaspoon at a time as a colouring and savoury note. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest single substitute for the pair, and tomato ketchup is not.
- A glass of claretClaret is red Bordeaux, and a wine glass of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though usage varied. Any dry, unoaked red will do the same work. Add it with the stock so the alcohol cooks off before the fish goes in.
- The shellfish shellA lobster or crab shell simmered in the stock adds real depth, alongside the fish trimmings and the bottled seasonings. Roast the shells dry for ten minutes first if you want more of it. Without shells, a well-made fish fumet is the substitute.
- Sweet herbsA bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf, tied so it can be pulled out before straining. "Sweet" here means aromatic rather than sugary.
- SourcingSeveral large rays sold historically as skate, including the common skate, are now severely depleted and protected in some waters. Buy whatever wing your fishmonger can name and vouch for rather than asking for "skate" generically.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Two skate wings, about 2 lb in total, with the sauce, will serve four.
Skate was cheap fish — the fourpence to sixpence a pound quoted here puts it at the bottom of the Victorian fish stall, well below turbot or salmon. Its flesh is coarse-grained and faintly sweet, and it carries a strong sauce better than a delicate white fish does, which is why so many nineteenth-century skate recipes drown it in black butter, caper sauce, or as here a brown stock spiked with ketchup, soy and claret. That trio of seasonings is a good marker of the period: bottled mushroom and walnut ketchups and imported soy were the standard English larder shortcuts to savoury depth, decades before anyone wrote about glutamates. The method itself — poach the fish in a stock built from its own trimmings and a shellfish carcass, then thicken it into the sauce — is straightforwardly the French approach to a fish braise, adapted to a fish the French were also fond of.