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Skate, Curried
Curried skate requires to be cooked very carefully, or it will drop to pieces. Boil two pounds of skate with a little of the liver; drain it well, and put it on a dish. Whilst the fish is boiling, slice two onions and an apple, and fry them in a little butter till soft. Rub them patiently through a sieve, and mix smoothly with the pulp a tea-spoonful of curry-powder, a dessert-spoonful of curry-paste, a tea-spoonful of ground rice, and about a pint of stock. Boil the sauce, and stir it frequently. When it is thick and smooth pour it upon the fish in the dish, and send rice boiled for curry to table in a tureen. Time, about twenty minutes to boil the fish. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per pound.
A Victorian curry sauce built on fried onion and apple rather than a roux, poured over poached skate. The dish stands or falls on how gently the fish is cooked.
- Handle the fish, not the sauce, with careSkate wing is a fan of soft cartilage and delicate flesh that collapses if it is rolled about in a rapid boil. Bring the water to a bare shiver, slide the wing in, and lift it out on a wide slice or a piece of muslin.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwo pounds of skate wing, an inch thick at the shoulder, needs roughly 8 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer; the flesh should just lift away from the cartilage in strips. Twenty minutes risks exactly the collapse the first line warns against.
- The liverThe recipe assumes the liver comes with the fish; skate liver is rich and soft, often compared to monkfish liver. It is rarely available now; the dish works without it, and the sauce carries the flavour.
- Ammonia smellSkate, like other rays, holds urea in its flesh and develops a faint ammonia odour as it ages. A light whiff rinses away in cold acidulated water; a strong one means the fish is past use.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. Curry-paste in this period was a bought commercial product, oily and salty, sold alongside curry-powder; a good jarred curry paste is the nearest equivalent, and you may want less salt elsewhere.
- Ground riceA finely milled rice, near enough to rice flour, used here as the thickener instead of flour or cornflour. A teaspoon in a pint of stock gives a very light body, so expect a pouring sauce rather than a coating one; add more if you want it thicker.
- Rubbing through a sieveA blender does in seconds what the original asks you to do patiently with a wooden spoon. Pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the silky texture the instruction implies.
- StockA pint is 20 fl oz Imperial, about 2 1/3 US cups. Fish or a light chicken stock suits; it should already taste good on its own.
- YieldTwo pounds of wing serves four generously with the rice served separately, as directed.
Skate was one of the cheapest things on a Victorian fish slab — the fourpence to sixpence a pound quoted here is well under the price of turbot at the same date — and it suffered from a reputation for coarseness and the faint ammonia tang of an ageing ray. Curry was often reached for as an answer to a strong-flavoured or cheap fish, and by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared, commercial curry-powder and curry-paste had been staples of the British grocer for the better part of a century, sold in tins by firms whose blends bore almost no relation to any single Indian cooking tradition. The apple in the sauce is a distinctly English touch, a sweetening agent that appears in nineteenth-century British curry recipes and persisted into twentieth-century "curried" dishes long after it had ceased to be defensible. What the recipe really preserves is a period logic about fish: buy what is cheap, cook it in water, and let a made sauce do the work.