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One Cucumber (Gill of White Sauce)
One gill of White Sauce.
A handful of Spinach.
Half a gill of Cream.
Seasoning. Peel the uncooked cucumber and pound it in a mortar with a handful of uncooked spinach, and pass them through a hair sieve. Stir this purée into the white sauce and thin it with the cream.
Sauce Écrevisses. (Shrimp Sauce.) Ingredients.
One pint of picked Shrimps.
Half a pint of Fish Stock or Milk.
One gill of Cream.
Two ounces and a half of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Bayleaf. Parsley. One teaspoonful of Anchovy Sauce.
A few drops of Lemon Juice.
Cook one ounce and a half of butter and flour together, stir in the fish stock or milk; let it boil for ten minutes, then add the anchovy sauce and salt.
Rinse the shrimps in a little cold water, then pound them in a mortar with the other ounce of butter, stir them into the sauce, add the cream and lemon juice, cook well, pass through a tammy. re-heat, and serve.
Two cold-water fish sauces from the same page: a raw cucumber-and-spinach purée let down with cream, and a pounded shrimp butter sauce. Both depend on fine straining, which is where the mortar and tammy come in.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 140 ml. Half a gill is roughly 70 ml. Half a pint of fish stock is 10 fl oz, roughly 285 ml.
- Hair sieve and tammyBoth are fine straining meshes or cloths; a chinois or a fine nylon sieve does the same work, and a blender does the pounding. Straining is what gives the smooth texture the recipe expects, so do not skip it even if the purée looks smooth.
- The cucumber sauce is uncookedCucumber and spinach both go in raw and are only warmed through in the sauce. Boiling the finished sauce turns the colour from bright green to olive and thins the cucumber to water; bring it just to serving heat.
- Salt the cucumber firstA peeled cucumber, seeded, salted for twenty minutes and squeezed dry gives a much less watery purée. The original gives no such step.
- Picked shrimpsThese are peeled small brown shrimps, the sort sold potted. A pint by volume is roughly 300 g of peeled shrimp. Cooked cold-water prawns work; do not substitute large raw tiger prawns, which have neither the flavour nor the texture for pounding.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled anchovy condiment, now much less common though anchovy essence is still sold. A scant teaspoon of anchovy paste, or one mashed salted anchovy fillet, gives the same salty depth. Season with salt only after it goes in.
- Boil the roux base ten minutesThis cooks out the raw flour before the shrimp butter and cream go in. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, or it will catch.
- YieldThe cucumber sauce makes about 225 ml, enough for four portions of poached salmon or turbot. The shrimp sauce makes closer to 600 ml and will serve six to eight.
Both of these belong to the standard repertoire of sauces for boiled and poached fish in late Victorian and Edwardian professional cooking, where a plain piece of turbot, salmon or sole was judged largely on what came with it. The green cucumber sauce is a mild relation of sauce verte, the spinach present chiefly for colour rather than flavour, and cucumber with salmon is an English pairing of long standing. Sauce \means crayfish sauce, and the French name attached to a pint of English picked shrimps shows how kitchens of the period borrowed classical nomenclature for local ingredients; brown shrimps were sold already boiled and peeled, and pounding them with butter and passing the result through a tammy is often described as the usual way of extracting their flavour before sieves gave way to blenders.