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Sole, Sauce For
Mix a table-spoonful of dried flour with a good slice of fresh butter. Pour half a pint of boiling water upon the mixture, stir it well, and let it boil for ten minutes. Add a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar and a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar. A tea-spoonful of essence of anchovy may be added if liked. Serve immediately. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for a pair of soles.
A plain butter-and-flour sauce sharpened with two flavoured vinegars — the Victorian answer to melted butter, and quicker than a milk-based white sauce. A few of the quantities and ingredients need translating.
- The hinge: work the paste coldRub the flour into the softened butter to a smooth paste (a beurre manié) before any liquid touches it, then pour the boiling water on in a thin stream while whisking hard. Add the water in one go without whisking and the flour is likely to seize into lumps that ten minutes of boiling may not fully disperse.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. With one tablespoon of flour this gives a thin, pourable sauce rather than a coating one.
- "A good slice of fresh butter"Read this as 1 to 1½ oz, roughly 2–3 tablespoons. "Fresh" means unsalted; Victorian kitchens also kept heavily salted keeping-butter, which would make this sauce aggressive alongside the vinegars.
- Dried flourFlour was spread on a tin and warmed in a cooling oven to drive off moisture, partly to keep it and partly because dry flour blends into butter more smoothly. Modern flour needs no drying.
- Ten minutes of boilingLonger than a modern cook would allow, but the point is to cook out the raw starch taste in a sauce with no milk or stock to hide it. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, or the bottom will catch and the sauce will reduce noticeably.
- Chilli vinegarOnce a standard cruet item: whole dried red chillies steeped in vinegar for a week or two. If you have none, a scant teaspoon of white wine vinegar with a few drops of a plain fermented hot sauce is close enough.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled anchovy liquor, thinner than today's paste. Use about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, and add it off the heat.
- ServingSufficient for a pair of soles, so two to four people. It skins over as it cools and will not reheat well — make it while the fish is under the grill and send it to table at once.
- Probable costSixpence: a sauce built on water rather than stock or cream, costing a fraction of a hollandaise.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a British fish dinner meant melted butter, and any cook wanting to do better without expense reached for flavoured vinegars. Tarragon and chilli vinegars, along with cucumber, shallot and horseradish, are often said to have been staples of the Victorian store cupboard — a matter of leaves or pods and a bottle of vinegar, and a way of keeping a summer flavour available in February. Anchovy essence did the same work for savouriness that bottled sauces and stock cubes would later take over; it appears throughout nineteenth-century fish cookery precisely because a household could keep it for months. Sole itself was the prestige flatfish of the period, carried inland by rail, and the tendency in these books seems to be that the better the fish the plainer the sauce — this one exists to season, not to smother.