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Skate, with Black Butter Sauce, Excellent
Take about two pounds of white skate. Wash it well, and put it into a saucepan with as much cold water as will barely cover it, a cupful of vinegar, a sliced onion, a bunch of parsley, and a little pepper and salt. Bring the liquor gently to the boil, skim it, then draw the saucepan to the side, and let its contents simmer gently for ten minutes. Five minutes before the skate is done enough put in the liver, and boil it also. Take up the skate, drain and trim it, and skin it on both sides. Put it on a dish, sprinkle a little salt and pepper on it, place the liver on the side, and garnish with fried parsley. Have ready prepared a little brown butter sauce; pour this over the fish, and serve immediately. The sauce may be made as follows. Put four ounces of fresh butter into a saucepan, and stir it over a sharp fire till it is brown, without being burnt. Add two tablespoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, two table-spoonfuls of Harvey's sauce, a table-spoonful of bruised capers, a quarter of a pint of brown sauce, and half a tea-spoonful of essence of anchovies. Simmer all gently for five minutes, and serve. Time altogether, about three-quarters of an hour to prepare. Probable cost, skate, 4d. to 6d. per pound Sufficient for four or five persons. (See also SKATE, AU BEURRE NOIR.)
A Victorian treatment of skate wing: poached in an acidulated court-bouillon, then dressed with a browned-butter sauce that has been reinforced with bottled condiments. Most of the work is in getting the fish out of the pan intact.
- Buy the wing, skinnedFishmongers now sell skate as trimmed wings, usually already skinned, which removes the awkward step of peeling both sides of a hot, slippery piece of fish. Two pounds is one large wing or two small ones.
- "White skate" and sourcingIn this book the phrase appears to mean pale, white-fleshed skate rather than a named species. Rostroraja alba, the true white skate, and the common skate Dipturus batis are now protected and cannot be landed; buy whatever wing your fishmonger sells under a current sustainable label.
- The ammonia testSkate carries urea in its flesh, which converts to ammonia as it ages. A faint whiff is normal in fish a day or two old and cooks off; a sharp ammoniac smell means it is past use. The original does not soak the fish but simmers it in vinegared water, which may help offset this.
- Ten minutes is about rightUnusually for a nineteenth-century fish recipe, the timing holds. A thick wing wants eight to twelve minutes at a bare tremble; the flesh should come away from the cartilage in ribs. Never let it boil hard or the wing shreds.
- The liverSkate liver is rich and was prized, but it is almost never sold now. Omit it without loss, or ask a fishmonger who breaks down whole fish.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy condiment of the period, long discontinued. Worcestershire sauce is the closest surviving relative and stands in at the same quantity.
- Brown sauce here means espagnoleBrown sauce here means a stock-based sauce -- Not the bottled brown sauce of a modern table, but the book's own stock-based brown sauce, close in kind to a classical espagnole. A quarter of a pint is five imperial fluid ounces, a scant two-thirds of a US cup; use a good reduced veal or fish stock thickened lightly if you have no espagnole to hand.
- Essence of anchoviesAnchovy paste from a tube, or a single mashed salted fillet, gives the same half-teaspoon of salt-and-umami backbone.
- Browning the butterFour ounces of butter over a sharp fire moves from foaming to hazelnut-brown to burnt in seconds. Take it off the heat the moment the solids are the colour of a filbert, and stand well back when the vinegar goes in.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds, until they stop hissing and turn brittle and vivid green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldThe original states simply four or five persons.
Skate au beurre noir is a French dish that crossed the Channel wholesale, and Cassell's gives it twice, once under its English name and once under the French. The pairing is logical rather than decorative: skate's flesh is mild and slightly gelatinous, and the browned butter sharpened with vinegar and capers supplies the acid and salt it lacks. What marks this version as late-Victorian British rather than French is the bottled reinforcement of Harvey's sauce and essence of anchovies, two products of the great age of commercial condiments, when even a classically trained kitchen reached for the store cupboard to deepen a sauce. Skate was cheap food here, the 4d. to 6d. a pound quoted putting it well below prime white fish. The instruction to eat the liver is a reminder of an older habit of using the whole fish, one that has largely disappeared from British fishmongers' counters.