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Sauce Anchovois
Bone and pound the anchovies. Add them, with the clove of garlic, to half a pint of good melted butter, prepared with one ounce of butter, half an ounce of flour, and half a pint of fishstock made from the bones of the soles; boil for six minutes, and strain before serving.
Fish sauce is always better if it is made from fish-stock.
A short British roux sauce dressed up with a French name. The only real obstacles are the vocabulary and the assumption that you have sole bones to hand.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn British cookery of this period melted butter means a plain white sauce thickened with a butter-and-flour roux — here the ounce of butter, half-ounce of flour and half-pint of stock. Nothing is simply melted.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. With ½ oz (roughly 2 tablespoons) of flour to that much liquid, the sauce is deliberately thin — a pouring sauce, not a coating one.
- The anchoviesThe instruction to bone them means salt-packed whole fish, which need rinsing and soaking before use. Modern tinned fillets in oil are already boned; the recipe names no quantity, so six to eight fillets, drained and mashed to a paste, is a reasonable stand-in.
- SaltNo salt is called for and none should be added until the sauce is finished and tasted. Anchovies, and the fish stock, will usually carry it.
- The garlicA whole peeled clove, bruised, added for perfume and then removed at the straining. Do not chop it — the sauce is meant to be smooth and only faintly scented.
- The six minutesThis is the hinge. The boil is what cooks the raw taste out of the flour and lets the anchovy dissolve into the sauce; short of that it tastes pasty. Stir throughout, as a thin roux sauce catches on the pan base quickly.
- Fish stock from the bonesSole frames need only a short simmer, around 20 minutes, with an onion and a few peppercorns; long cooking is generally held to make fish stock bitter and gluey. If you have none, a light stock is far better than water, which is the point of the closing sentence.
- YieldAbout 10 fl oz — enough for four to six portions of poached or fried sole.
Anchovy sauce was one of the fixed points of the British fish course, and here it carries a French name for what a plain-speaking household manual would have called anchovy sauce. The anchovy had long been a British seasoning, sold as bottled essence and as potted paste, and used less as a fish than as a source of savoury depth in an era with no bottled umami to hand. The last line points the same way — the insistence on fish stock rather than water, and on making it from the bones of the very soles the sauce will accompany, which reads as the economy of a working kitchen rather than a domestic one.