Home › Meat or Fish Sauces › Meat or Fish Sauces
Meat or Fish Sauces
1 tablespoonful flour, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 head celery.
Cut celery into pieces two inches long and boil in salted water for an hour. Mix smoothly flour, butter, and milk, stir until boiling; add the celery pulp, season with salt and pepper and a little mace; let it boil quickly for two minutes. Strain.
Anchovy Sauce.
Bone 4 anchovies and bruise in a mortar to a smooth paste; stir them in a drawn-butter sauce, simmer five minutes, or stir in 2 teaspoonfuls essence of anchovy. A little cayenne is an improvement.
Two sauces run together in one paragraph: a celery cream sauce for boiled fowl or fish, and an anchovy butter sauce. Both are sound, but the proportions and timings need adjusting.
- The thickening is too thin as writtenOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of milk gives a sauce barely thicker than the milk itself. For a coating consistency use two tablespoons of flour to two of butter, cooked together a minute before the milk goes in.
- A head of celeryThis means the whole bunch, not a single rib — roughly a pound trimmed. Celery of this period was generally coarser and stringier than the celery sold now.
- An hour is far too longModern celery collapses to grey mush in an hour of boiling. Fifteen to twenty minutes in salted water is enough to soften it for pressing through a sieve.
- "Add the celery pulp" then "strain"The intent is to force the cooked celery through a sieve into the white sauce, then strain out the strings after a brief boil. A blender does the first step better; you will still want to pass it through a fine sieve.
- MaceThe outer covering of nutmeg, sold as blades or ground. It is milder and more floral than nutmeg; a pinch of ground mace, or one blade simmered in the milk and removed, matches the intent.
- Drawn butter sauceThe nineteenth-century base the anchovy sauce is built on: butter melted with a little flour and hot water or fish stock, whisked smooth. Any plain butter sauce or thin béchamel will serve.
- Four anchoviesWhole fish, so about eight fillets from a modern tin. Rinse them, and hold back the salt in the sauce entirely until you have tasted it.
- Essence of anchovyA commercial bottled anchovy extract, still sold in Britain as anchovy sauce. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest common substitute, used sparingly.
- YieldThe celery sauce makes roughly two cups, enough for four to six servings alongside boiled or poached fish, chicken or turkey. The anchovy sauce depends on how much drawn butter you make, as the recipe does not say.
Celery sauce and anchovy sauce were both fixtures of the English service that American household books inherited, and they appear here as part of a run of sauces meant to be paired off against particular meats — celery with boiled fowl and turkey, anchovy with boiled or fried white fish. Celery had a longer season as a cooked vegetable than most people now assume; it is often said to have been stronger and more bitter before it settled into the crisp, blanched salad stalk of the twentieth century, though blanching to sweeten it was already common practice in this period, and boiling it down into a purée was a way of using the coarse outer ribs. Anchovy essence, meanwhile, was one of a family of bottled savoury extracts — along with mushroom ketchup, Harvey's sauce and Worcestershire — that Victorian and Edwardian kitchens kept on hand for exactly this purpose: a shortcut to the salt-and-umami depth that pounding whole cured fish in a mortar otherwise required.