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Tench, Sauces For
Tench may be served with melted butter, anchovy sauce, parsley sauce, poulette sauce, or with a white sauce prepared as follows. Rub a large lump of butter to a smooth paste with a tea-spoonful of flour. Add a table-spoonful of water, and stir the mixture over the fire for two minutes. Pour in a quarter of a pint of thick cream, or, failing cream, use milk. Have a filleted anchovy finely minced. Stir the sauce over the fire until it is on the point of boiling, add a table-spoonful of Indian soy, pour it into a tureen, stir for a minute or two, put with it a little pepper and salt and a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice.
A short list of alternative sauces followed by one worked recipe — essentially a thin cream velouté sharpened with anchovy, soy and lemon. The measurements are of their time and one or two need translating.
- "A large lump of butter"Genuinely vague. For a teaspoon of flour and a quarter pint of cream, 1 to 1½ oz (30–40 g) gives a sauce that coats without being pasty; much more and the sauce risks separating when the lemon goes in.
- A quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz — a scant ⅔ US cup. The finished sauce is enough for two to three portions of fish, not a whole table.
- Indian soySoy sauce, sold in Victorian Britain as "India soy" and often described in period sources as thicker and sweeter than the soy sauce sold today. A tablespoon of modern dark soy is assertive; start with two teaspoons and taste, especially as the anchovy is already salty.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction to bring it only "to the point of boiling" is the hinge. Boiled cream meeting a tablespoon of lemon juice can curdle, and milk used in place of cream is more vulnerable still. Take the pan off the heat before the acid goes in, and add the lemon last as written.
- The anchovyA filleted salt anchovy or a good oil-packed fillet, minced to nothing so it dissolves. Anchovy paste or essence works, and both were on sale at the time; half a teaspoon is plenty.
- Poulette sauceFor readers checking the alternatives: a velouté finished with egg yolk, lemon and parsley. "Melted butter" in Victorian English cookery generally means the old flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan.
- SaltSeason at the very end and lightly. Between anchovy and soy the sauce is close to fully salted before any is added.
Tench is a thickset European carp relation, a bottom-feeder of still ponds and slow rivers, and it carried a reputation for muddiness that may well account for the battery of sharp, salty sauces gathered here — anchovy, soy and lemon are all doing the same job of cutting through a soft, sweetish freshwater flesh. Fish of this kind were pond-farmed on English estates for centuries, and monastic and manorial stew ponds kept tench alongside carp because both survive being moved alive and can be held in a tank until wanted. "Indian soy" belongs to the same nineteenth-century pantry as ketchup, harvey's sauce and mushroom essence: bottled Asian and Asian-derived condiments that British cooks folded into cream sauces as a matter of course. By the time Cassell's was compiled, coarse freshwater fish was already sliding out of fashionable eating in favour of sea fish brought inland by rail, which may be part of why a dictionary entry like this reads more as a reference note than an invitation.