Home › Sauces › Cold Fish Sauce for Trout or Salmon
Cold Fish Sauce for Trout or Salmon
Ingredients.
One gill of White Sauce.
One gill of Mayonnaise Sauce.
One gill of thick Cream.
Two spoonfuls of grated Horse-radish.
Some chopped Indian Pickle, Pepper,
The book gives quantities but the method has been cut off mid-sentence; what survives is a cold compound sauce of the late Victorian buffet type, built by folding three ready-made bases together. Everything must be cold before it meets anything else, or the cream will thin and the mayonnaise will slacken.
- The gillIn a British cookery book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, so roughly 2/3 US cup. Three gills of base is 15 fl oz before the flavourings go in; the recipe gives no yield, but this is a generous quantity for a dish of cold fish.
- White sauceA plain flour-and-butter béchamel made with milk or fish stock, cooked out properly and then cooled. It is here as body and economy, diluting the mayonnaise. Cool it with a film of butter or plastic on the surface so no skin forms, and pass it through a sieve if it has set firm.
- Thick creamVictorian "thick cream" is closer to modern double or heavy cream. Whip it only to soft, floppy peaks; taken further it will turn grainy once acid mayonnaise and pickle vinegar are folded in.
- Indian pickleA mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickle, typically of vegetables such as cauliflower, cucumber and onion; period books use the name more or less interchangeably with mixed pickle, and it is close to what is now sold as piccalilli. Chop it fine and drain it well, or the vinegar will break the sauce.
- Horseradish"Two spoonfuls" is unspecified between tea and table; start with two teaspoons of freshly grated root and taste, since fresh horseradish is far sharper than the jarred, vinegared kind. If using jarred, drain it and expect to need more.
- Order of workSlacken the white sauce first, whisk in the mayonnaise, then fold in the whipped cream, and only then the horseradish, pickle and seasoning. Season at the very end: the pickle brings its own salt.
- Raw eggThe mayonnaise component is never cooked. If serving to anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- ServingIntended for cold poached salmon or trout, and kept refrigerated until it goes to table. Cream-and-vinegar sauces of this kind are best made close to the time of serving.
Cold sauces of this kind belong to the era of the cold collation and the ball supper, when a whole poached salmon dressed on a long dish was a centrepiece of an English summer buffet and needed something richer than plain mayonnaise beside it. The construction is characteristic of Victorian cookery of the more elaborate sort: rather than a single emulsion, the cook layers a made sauce, an emulsion and whipped cream, the béchamel stretching the eggs and oil. "Indian pickle" records the long British appetite for turmeric-and-mustard preserves in the Indian manner, commercially bottled and thoroughly domesticated as a store-cupboard flavouring by the later nineteenth century. Horseradish with fish is older still and is often associated with northern European practice.