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Fish Sauce (Tablespoonfuls butter)
3 tablespoonfuls butter. 1 wineglassful vinegar. 2 wineglassfuls tomato or mushroom catsup. Pepper, salt, and mustard to the taste. Stew till well mixed. --Mrs. J. D.
A quick pan sauce of the old school: fat, acid, and a bottled savoury base, warmed together and poured over boiled or fried fish. The whole thing takes five minutes once the measures are translated.
- WineglassfulA wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces in American cookbooks of this period, which would give roughly 1/4 cup vinegar and 1/2 cup catsup; with the butter that makes something close to a cupful of sauce.
- Catsup is not modern ketchupNineteenth-century tomato catsup was thin, sharp and heavily spiced, closer to a spiced tomato juice than to the sweet emulsion sold now. Mushroom catsup — a dark, salty, near-black liquid still made commercially in Britain — is the other option here and gives a much deeper, more savoury sauce. If you use modern bottled ketchup, cut the vinegar back or the sauce will read as sweet-and-sour.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than a prepared jarred mustard, though the recipe does not say. Half a teaspoon is a fair starting point; slaking it in a spoonful of the vinegar first will keep it from staying grainy.
- "Stew till well mixed"Warm gently over low heat only until the butter melts and the sauce comes together, a minute or two. Hard boiling drives off the vinegar's brightness and can break the butter out of suspension.
- VinegarThe recipe does not specify. Cider vinegar is a plausible choice for an American kitchen of the period; distilled white vinegar works but is blunter, and malt vinegar suits the mushroom catsup version.
- ServingNothing is said about serving, but a sauce of this kind is best spooned hot over plain boiled, baked or fried fish. It will not hold well, so make it while the fish rests.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these initialled, half-line recipes — "Mrs. J. D." assumed her reader already knew what a fish sauce looked like and needed only the proportions. The reliance on bottled catsup is the period detail worth noticing: mushroom and walnut catsups were pantry staples long before tomato catsup overtook them, valued as a shelf-stable shot of savour in a kitchen with no stock cubes and no refrigeration. Butter-and-vinegar sauces of this kind descend from the English melted-butter tradition, and the addition of dry mustard is a common Anglo-American touch for oily or plainly cooked fish, where the acid and the sharpness cut through.