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SKATE, WITH CAPER SAUCE (another way)
Boil the skate in a vessel with water, vinegar, salt, pepper, a sliced onion, parsley, green onions, bay-leaves, and thyme. When done, pick it neatly, and remove it into another clean vessel; pour over it some of the liquor in which it has been boiling, then drain it, and send it up to table, either entire or in pieces, with caper sauce in a tureen, or poured over the fish if preferred.
A court-bouillon poach, written for cooks who already knew how much water and vinegar to use. The quantities are left entirely to judgement, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- The court-bouillonUse enough water to cover the fish by an inch, with roughly 2 tablespoons of vinegar per quart, a teaspoon of salt per quart, the sliced onion, a few peppercorns, parsley and green onion tops, a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme. The acid firms the flesh and cuts the faint ammoniacal note skate can carry.
- Keep it below a boilDespite the word "boil", skate wing should be brought just to a bare shiver and held there. A rolling boil shreds the fibres apart from the cartilage and clouds the liquor.
- TimingA wing of about 1 lb, 1 inch at the thickest, takes 8-10 minutes at a simmer. It is done when the flesh lifts away from the central cartilage in clean strips.
- "Pick it neatly"Most likely scraping off the skin, which is tough and mucus-covered, and lifting the flesh clear of the cartilage. Many fishmongers now sell wings already skinned; if not, poaching first makes the skin easy to scrape away with the back of a knife.
- Ammonia smellSkate is a shark relative and carries urea in its flesh, which converts to ammonia as it ages. A faint whiff in the raw fish disappears in cooking; a strong one means the fish is too old to use.
- The re-covering with liquorPouring hot cooking liquor over the picked flesh in a clean vessel keeps it from drying and stiffening while the sauce is finished. Drain thoroughly before saucing or the caper sauce will slacken.
- Caper sauceIn cookery of this period usually a white sauce or melted-butter sauce with capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in at the end. Rinse brined capers if they are very salty; the poaching liquor has already salted the fish.
- YieldTwo skate wings of about 1 lb each serve four as a main course. Serve at once, on hot plates, since skate cools quickly.
Skate was cheap fish in Victorian Britain, plentiful as a by-catch and long regarded as second-rank, and Cassell's gives it several treatments rather than one showpiece method. The vinegar court-bouillon here is straight out of French practice, and the pairing with capers echoes the older and better-known raie au beurre noir, in which browned butter and a splash of vinegar or a scatter of capers do the same job of sharpening a rich, slightly gelatinous fish. The instruction to hang the fish's reputation on careful picking is telling: skate wing is mostly flesh over a fan of soft cartilage. Skate is often said to improve after a day or two out of the water, when the flesh loses some of its stiffness, though modern advice is simply to buy it very fresh.