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Anchovy Sauce
Soak eight anchovies in cold water, for several hours; cut up and stew in a very little water for twenty minutes; strain into one teacup drawn butter. Pour all in a saucepan and set it on the fire. Beat it up until it comes to a boil; pour into a sauce tureen. Add a little cayenne pepper; one squeezo of lemon.--Mrs. S. T.
A short English-style fish sauce built on drawn butter. Two things decide whether it works: understanding what drawn butter meant in 1879, and not overcooking the anchovy into salt sludge.
- Drawn butter is not clarified butterIn nineteenth-century American books, drawn butter is a thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of butter, thinned with hot water or fish stock to a teacupful, then more butter beaten in off the heat. Clarified butter will not carry the anchovy and will break the moment it boils.
- A teacupReckon a teacup at somewhere between a gill (4 fl oz) and 6 fl oz; it was not a standardised measure, and household teacups of the period ran smaller than a modern mug.
- The anchovies she meansEight whole salt-packed anchovies, sold in barrels or jars and heavily cured. Those are still available in Italian groceries. If you use tinned fillets in oil, eight fillets is about half the fish and already far less salty — the long soak is unnecessary and will only wash out flavour.
- Why the soakingSalt-packed fish need several hours in cold water, changed once or twice, purely to draw the salt. Skip the step with salt-packed anchovies and the finished sauce is inedible. Bone and rinse them after soaking.
- Twenty minutes of stewingThat is long enough for the fillets to fall apart completely, which is the point: you strain the liquor and discard the solids. Keep the water to a minimum, as the recipe says, or you dilute the sauce past usefulness.
- "Beat it up until it comes to a boil"Whisk constantly and pull it off the moment it bubbles. A flour-bound butter sauce held at a rolling boil will thin and then separate; the beating is what keeps it emulsified.
- SqueezoA squeeze; perhaps the juice of an eighth to a quarter of a lemon. The recipe adds it in the tureen, off the heat.
- Yield and useA teacup of drawn butter plus the strained anchovy liquor, so call it a cup or so. It belongs on boiled or baked white fish.
Anchovy sauce came to Virginia tables straight out of the English kitchen, where anchovy in one form or another — essence, paste, whole salt fish, or bottled sauce — was the standard savoury note long before commercial Worcestershire made it a pantry staple. The fish itself was almost never eaten fresh in Anglo-American cooking; it arrived salt-cured from the Mediterranean and functioned as a seasoning, a role often traced back to Roman garum, though the line between the two is more culinary logic than documented descent. Its presence here is a reminder that Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1879, is a contributor's book: recipes were gathered from named and initialled Virginia housewives, and the initials "Mrs. S. T." stand where a byline would go. A sauce like this one, resting on drawn butter, shows how thoroughly the flour-and-butter English sauce vocabulary had settled into Southern household cooking by that date.