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Skate, Crimped
Skin the skate on both sides, cut it in strips the length of the fish and an inch broad, roll each length round the finger, and tie it with thread. Lay the rolled strips for an hour or two in salted water mixed with a table-spoonful of vinegar, or in cold spring water. Fish to be crimped should be taken as soon as possible after it is dead. The inhuman practice of crimping it while alive cannot be too strongly deprecated. Crimped skate is generally sold cut in slices, which should be rolled and tied with string, with a little piece of the liver in each roll. Put the fish into fast-boiling salted water, and boil it gently until done enough. Take it up, drain it, remove the string, and serve on a napkin with one of the sauces recommended for boiled skate in a tureen, or without a napkin and with the sauce poured over it. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per pound.
Crimping is a Victorian handling technique rather than a flavouring: the flesh is cut and steeped in cold salted water so that it firms and sets before cooking. The method still works, but skate has particular quirks that the original assumes you already know.
- What crimping isCutting very fresh fish into strips and holding it in cold, heavily salted water (the recipe also allows plain cold spring water) contracts the muscle and gives a firm, almost crisp texture on cooking. It works best on fish that is genuinely fresh; on a fillet several days old it does little.
- The soak matters mostSkate carries urea in its flesh, which breaks down to ammonia as it ages. The salted-and-vinegar soak here both crimps and sweetens the fish. If a raw wing smells sharply of ammonia at the counter, no amount of soaking will fix it — buy something else.
- Buying itSkate is now sold as skinned wings, so the instruction to skin both sides usually falls away. Ask for a thick wing; thin outer edges overcook long before the rolls at the centre are done.
- SourcingSeveral large skate and ray species, notably the common or blue skate, are severely depleted and landing them is restricted in UK and EU waters. Buy from a fishmonger who can name the species — thornback ray is the usual, and better-managed, choice.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes is long by current practice. Rolls an inch across, dropped into barely trembling water, are done in about eight to ten minutes, when the flesh slips cleanly off the cartilage ribs. Held longer they turn stringy and shed water.
- "Boil it gently"Take the pan off the full boil once the fish is in. A rolling boil will unroll the strips and shred the delicate flesh even with thread around them.
- The liverSkate liver is rich and soft, prized in French cooking and almost never sold in Britain now. It needs to come from a fish handled properly on the boat; if your fishmonger cannot supply it, leave it out rather than substituting.
- Sauces and servingThe sauces likely meant are caper sauce, shrimp sauce or black butter with capers and vinegar. Serving "on a napkin" simply means a folded cloth on the platter to absorb draining water. A pound of wing will feed about two as a main course.
- CostFour to sixpence a pound placed skate among the cheapest fish on the slab. It is no longer a bargain fish, which is a fair index of how much stocks have changed.
Skate was for a long time the fish of the cheap end of the market — coarse, plentiful and associated with fried-fish shops and with Lenten eating in Catholic households. Crimping was applied across the fishmonger's trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to cod and salmon as well as skate, and was valued because it gave firm, sweet flesh in an age before refrigeration, when texture was the plainest available proof of freshness. The aside condemning the crimping of live fish is worth noting: fish were reportedly gashed while still alive on the belief that they crimped better, and Victorian cookery writers, alongside the wider anti-cruelty movement of the period, argued steadily against it. Cassell's compilers include the remark in passing.