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Skate, Marinaded
Remove the skin on both sides, and divide the fish into slices two or three inches long and an inch broad. Lay these in a dish, pour vinegar over them, and add a little pepper and salt, a bunch of parsley, and a sliced onion. Let the fish soak for some hours; when wanted, drain the pieces, dip them in flour, and fry them in hot dripping till they are brightly browned. Send them to table in a hot dish, garnished with fried parsley. Send caper sauce to table with them. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per pound.
A plain fried-fish dish that depends almost entirely on the freshness of the skate and on frying fat hot enough to set the flour crust before the flesh gives up its moisture.
- Buy the wings, already skinnedSkate is sold as wings, and fishmongers will skin them on request, which saves an awkward job with a stiff knife and a cloth. One large wing or two small ones, about 1 1/2 lb, gives four modest servings; the cartilage is not counted as edible weight.
- Freshness is the hingeSkate develops a distinct ammonia smell as it ages, because urea in the flesh breaks down. A faint whiff will wash off in the vinegar; a strong one means the fish is past use. Buy it the day you intend to cook, or at most a day ahead.
- Marinate cold"Some hours" meant a cool larder. Two to four hours in the refrigerator is plenty for slices this size; the vinegar firms the surface, and long soaking may leave the flesh mealy. Enough vinegar to half-cover, turned once, will probably serve as well as a full immersion.
- Dry before flouringDrain the pieces and pat them properly dry, or the flour turns to paste and slides off in the fat. Season the flour rather than relying on what was in the marinade.
- Dripping and frying heatBeef dripping was the ordinary shallow-frying fat of the period and still gives the best flavour here; lard or a neutral oil substitutes directly. Have the fat at about 350-375F and shallow-fry 3-4 minutes a side, until the flour is deep gold and the flesh lifts cleanly off the cartilage.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs of curly parsley dropped into the same hot fat for 15-30 seconds, then drained on paper. It spits; use a lid as a shield and make sure the parsley carries no water at all.
- Caper sauceFor fish this generally meant a butter or white sauce with chopped capers and a spoonful of their vinegar; many Victorian books give much the same sauce for boiled mutton. A beurre noisette with capers and lemon is a modern alternative that suits fried skate.
- The price"4d. to 6d. per pound" is pence in pre-decimal currency, part of the probable-cost figure the book attaches to its entries. Skate was among the cheaper fish on the slab then; it is no longer.
Skate was long a cheap fish in Britain, its awkward shape, its cartilage and its short keeping life telling against it, and it turns up in Victorian household books mainly crimped, boiled with caper sauce, or treated as here. Steeping fish in vinegar with onion and parsley before frying worked less as a tenderiser than as a corrective, meant to freshen fish of uncertain age and to season it through; the same logic lies behind soused mackerel. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery prints a probable cost with each entry, so a fish sold at a few pence a pound appears alongside turbot and sole; the book was written for households counting pennies as closely as courses.