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Skate, with Caper Sauce
Take two or three pieces of white skate. Roll them up, and tie them with string; then put them into fast-boiling water with salt and a little vinegar, and boil them gently until done enough. Five minutes before they are done put in the liver, and boil it with them. Take up the fish, drain it, and put it on a hot dish. Make three-quarters of a pint of good melted butter in a saucepan; stir into it while boiling two table-spoonfuls of bruised capers, pour the sauce over the fish, and serve hot. Time to boil the fish, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain Victorian poached fish with the standard English butter sauce. Two things need attention before anything else: what "melted butter" means, and the boiling time.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery books this is a flour-thickened butter sauce — a white roux slackened with water or fish liquor and finished with butter, about the consistency of thin cream. Simply pouring warm butter over the fish is not what is meant, and three-quarters of a pint of it would be inedible.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz — a scant two US cups of sauce for four or five people. That is generous by modern taste; a cup and a half is plenty.
- Twenty minutes is far too longTwenty minutes is likely longer than needed -- Skate is thin and cooks quickly, though a rolled and tied bundle is thicker than a flat wing and will take longer than a loose piece; start checking at around 10-12 minutes at a bare simmer. The flesh is done when it slides cleanly off the soft cartilage in ribbons. Prolonged boiling leaves it shredded and watery.
- "Fast-boiling water" then "boil gently"The book means bring the water to the boil, slide the fish in, and immediately drop the heat. A rolling boil breaks the delicate fibres apart before the centre is cooked.
- The vinegar is doing real workSkate carries urea in its flesh, which converts to ammonia as it ages. The acidulated water suppresses the smell. Buy skate that smells of nothing but the sea; a strong ammonia note at the fish counter means it is past use and no amount of vinegar will fix it.
- The liverSkate liver was prized and is almost impossible to buy now — it is removed at sea. If your fishmonger cannot supply it, omit it; nothing else in the dish depends on it.
- Sourcing the fish"Skate" on a modern counter is almost always thornback or another small ray sold as wings. Common skate (Dipturus batis) is critically endangered and protected in UK and EU waters — check that what you are buying is a legally landed species.
- Bruised capersCrush them lightly with the flat of a knife rather than chopping, so they release brine into the sauce but keep some texture. Salted capers want rinsing first; the sauce is already seasoned by the cooking water.
Skate was cheap fish in Victorian Britain — the fourpence to sixpence a pound quoted here puts it well below turbot or sole. The pairing with capers echoes French practice, where raie au beurre noir with capers and vinegar was already established; the English version uses the flour-thickened butter sauce in place of the browned butter. Rolling and tying the wings is practical rather than decorative: the thin triangular pieces curl violently in hot water otherwise. The instruction to poach the liver alongside reflects a household economy that made use of the richest part of the fish; its near-total disappearance from fishmongers' slabs is a modern loss rather than a modern squeamishness.