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Anchovy Sauce
1 cup broth or stock; 4 anchovies; 1 tablespoonful butter; 1 teaspoonful capers.
Wash and dry the anchovies, remove the bones, and cut up fine. Dredge them lightly with flour, and fry them five minutes in the butter without browning. Add the broth or stock, let it simmer fifteen minutes; then add the crushed capers, and more salt and pepper, if needed. Serve very hot with roast or boiled beef.
A short, sharp pan sauce for beef, thickened only by the flour clinging to the fish. The whole point is that the anchovies dissolve into the stock, so keep the heat low and give them time.
- The anchoviesThe recipe assumes whole salt-cured anchovies that need rinsing and boning. Modern oil-packed fillets are already boned and much less salty: use 6 to 8 fillets, blot them dry, and skip the washing step.
- Do not brown the butterThis is the hinge. Browned butter would dominate a sauce this small, and the fish are meant to soften rather than fry hard. Keep the pan at a bare sizzle for the five minutes and mash the fish with a fork as it softens.
- StockThe recipe asks only for "broth or stock", which in a household kitchen might well have been the liquid from boiled beef. Use unsalted or low-sodium stock, since four salt-cured fish carry a good deal of salt on their own.
- Salt last, if at allTaste only after the fifteen-minute simmer has concentrated the liquid. More often than not no salt is wanted; pepper and perhaps a squeeze of lemon are enough.
- The simmerFifteen minutes at a slow simmer will reduce the cup of stock somewhat and gives the flour time to lose its raw taste. If it tightens too far, loosen with a spoonful of stock rather than water.
- Capers"Crushed" here probably means bruising them, with the flat of a knife or a fork, so they release their brine. The recipe adds them after the simmer, so keep them to the last minute so they hold their sharpness.
- YieldSomething under a cup of finished sauce, enough to accompany a joint of roast or boiled beef for a small table. It does not hold well; make it while the meat rests.
Anchovy sauce was a common savoury sauce in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, valued because salted anchovies kept well in a barrel or jar and could supply savour to plain boiled and roast meats at any season. It sits alongside the bottled anchovy essences and Worcestershire-type sauces of the same era, whose ancestry is often traced back to the fermented fish sauces of the Roman kitchen. The pairing with boiled beef is natural enough: a large piece of meat simmered for hours yields both the stock and the dish, and the sauce could be built from that same broth.