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Skate, Stewed
Skin the skate on both sides, and cut it into neat pieces; fry these in hot fat till they are nicely browned; take them up, drain them, and lay them aside. Put the head, skin, and trimmings into a saucepan with two pints of water, an onion, and a little pepper and salt. Let the gravy simmer gently till it is strong, then strain it; put it back into the saucepan, thicken with brown thickening, and add half a dozen chives or a moderate-sized onion finely minced, two table-spoonfuls of finely-chopped parsley, a table-spoonful of chilli vinegar, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a table-spoonful of Harvey's sauce. Let the sauce boil till it is thick enough to coat the spoon; heat the fish in it, and serve. Time, five or six minutes to heat the fish.
A Victorian way of using the whole fish: the wings are fried, the head and trimmings make the stock, and a battery of bottled sauces does the seasoning. Most of the work is in sourcing the fish and rebuilding two condiments that no longer sit on every shelf.
- Buy skinned wingsSkinning a whole skate is a job for a fishmonger with a stiff knife, and few home cooks will have the head and trimmings the recipe calls for. Ask for skinned wings plus a bag of trimmings or any white fish bones for the stock. Two large wings, about 2 lb, feed four.
- Smell it firstSkate carries urea in its flesh, which converts to ammonia as it ages. A faint ammonia note can be rinsed away in acidulated water; a strong one means the fish is past use. Genuinely fresh skate smells of nothing much at all.
- Choose the speciesCommon skate (Dipturus batis) is now critically endangered and protected in European waters. Buy thornback or other ray wings from a managed fishery instead; the recipe works the same.
- Brown thickeningThis is the book's term for a brown roux, made in advance and kept: equal weights flour and butter or dripping cooked until nut-coloured. Roughly 1 to 2 oz of each, depending on how far the stock has reduced; the recipe also boils the sauce down until it coats the spoon.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy condiment of the period, no longer made. Worcestershire sauce is the closest surviving equivalent and can go in at the same tablespoon.
- Mushroom ketchup and chilli vinegarMushroom ketchup is still sold by a few British makers and is worth seeking out; a tablespoon of dark soy with a little mushroom soaking liquor stands in. Chilli vinegar is simply cider or wine vinegar steeped a week with a few dried chillies.
- Reduce, then reheatThe sauce must be at coating consistency before the fish goes back in. Skate flakes into strings if it sits in a simmering liquid, so the five or six minutes given is a gentle reheat over low heat, not further cooking.
- Frying stageFry in hot fat only long enough to colour, two to three minutes a side; the recipe does not specify flouring the pieces. They finish in the sauce.
Skate was cheap fish in nineteenth-century Britain, landed in quantity and often sold to households that could not afford turbot or sole, which is why a general dictionary of cookery gives it several treatments rather than one. The heavy seasoning here is characteristic of the period's approach to coarse fish: mushroom ketchup and Harvey's sauce were bottled flavourings sold by grocers from the late Georgian period onward, while chilli vinegar was as often made at home as bought, and cooks used them much as later kitchens used stock cubes, to build depth quickly out of a thin fish gravy. Harvey's sauce, traditionally traced to an eighteenth-century English innkeeper and marketed through the nineteenth century by the Lazenby firm, was among the best known of them; it has since disappeared, while Worcestershire sauce, a younger relative of the same anchovy-and-soy family, survived. The recipe's insistence on simmering the head and skin for stock reflects a household economy in which the trimmings of a whole fish were expected to season their own sauce.