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Skate, with Black Butter
Fry some parsley very green. Dish the skate according to taste. For a first-course dish the fish should be cut into slices. Put the fried parsley in the middle of the dish, and the butter under the fish. Beurre noir is made in an omelet-pan. Put a quarter of a pound of butter into the pan, and let it become very brown without burning; skim off the froth; add to it salt, pepper, and vinegar, and pour this over the fish, and the fried parsley in the centre. This dish does not look well, but it is relishing when well done.
Two techniques and no cooking time for the fish itself: this entry assumes you already know how to poach a skate wing, and treats the browned butter and fried parsley as the actual lesson.
- The fish is missing a stepNothing here tells you to cook the skate. Poach the wing in barely simmering salted water with a good splash of vinegar until the flesh pulls cleanly from the cartilage, roughly 8-12 minutes for a thick wing, then drain it well so the butter is not diluted.
- Buying skateAsk for skate or ray wing and smell it. A faint whiff of ammonia means the urea in the flesh has broken down; it will only get stronger with cooking. Some large skates, including the common skate, are protected and cannot be landed, so what you buy will be thornback or a similar ray.
- Beurre noir is not blackThe hinge of the dish. Take the butter to a deep hazelnut brown with a nutty smell and stop there. Butter goes from brown to acrid in well under a minute, so pull the pan off the heat while it is still slightly lighter than you want.
- Adding the vinegarOff the heat, and stand back. Vinegar hitting hot butter spits violently. A quarter pound of butter, about 115 g, wants roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of wine vinegar, added to taste.
- "Omelet-pan"A shallow, heavy pan with sloping sides. Any wide skillet works; the point is a broad surface so the milk solids brown evenly rather than scorching in a deep well of fat. Avoid black cast iron, where you cannot judge the colour.
- Frying parsleyUse dry, curly sprigs and shake off every drop of water first, or the fat will erupt. A few seconds in hot fat sets the colour bright green; longer and it goes brown and bitter. Drain on paper and salt lightly.
- YieldOne skate wing of 1 1/2 to 2 lb serves two as a main course, or four cut into slices as the first-course dish described here.
This is raie au beurre noir, one of the most durable dishes in French bourgeois cooking and a fixture of nineteenth-century English kitchens that looked to France for their fish cookery. Skate was cheap: its cartilaginous wings yield boneless strips of sweet flesh but the fish keeps poorly and smells of ammonia when it turns. Black butter, sharpened with vinegar, is the traditional partner for exactly that reason, since acid and browned dairy cut through a fish that can taste faintly of the sea's chemistry; the same sauce was served with calf's brains and poached eggs. The admission that "this dish does not look well" is unusually candid for a Victorian cookery book, and it is accurate. A grey wing under muddy brown butter earns nothing on presentation and everything on flavour.