Home › Cookery › Sauce for Fish
Sauce for Fish
Yolks of three eggs, one tablespoonful vinegar, half a tablespoonful fresh butter, a little salt.
To be stirred over a slow fire till it thickens, it must only be warm or it will curdle and spoil.--Mrs. S.
This is a thin, sharp egg-yolk sauce in the hollandaise family, written before anyone measured the temperature of a custard. The instruction that gives it its character — keep it only warm — is also the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The eggs never reach a safe temperatureThe eggs may not reach a safe temperature -- Salmonella in egg yolk is reliably destroyed only when the yolk is held at a measured temperature for a measured time. This recipe directs the cook to keep the sauce only warm, and offers no way of knowing whether the yolks reach that point before the sauce is served.
- Not enough acid to helpAcid is no substitute for heat -- the vinegar sharpens the sauce, but there is nothing in the formula that can be relied on to work against bacterial survival.
- No holding instructionWarm egg sauces sit in the range where bacteria multiply fastest, and the original gives no guidance on serving immediately or discarding leftovers.
- The thickening point is the whole difficultyYolks set and yolks curdle within a narrow band of heat, which is likely why Mrs. S. warns so firmly. Without a thermometer, a cook could judge the difference only by feel and appearance.
- If you want this sauceUse a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs or a properly tempered and thermometer-checked method. The proportions here are of historical interest, not a working formula.
- Reading the quantitiesSpoon measures of the 1870s were not standardised in the modern sense, so "a tablespoonful" should be read as approximate; "fresh butter" means butter that is unsalted and has not gone rancid -- the salt is added separately.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a collection of contributed receipts, which is why so many of them end in a name or an initial rather than a byline: Mrs. S. sent this one in, and it was printed much as she wrote it. The sauce belongs to the broad family of warm egg-and-vinegar dressings whose relation to the French sauce hollandaise is often asserted but remains unsettled, and which appear in nineteenth-century English cookery under the name "Dutch sauce" for boiled fish. Virginia tables ate a great deal of boiled and baked shad, rockfish and sheepshead. What the entry preserves best is the pre-thermometer craft of the thing: the whole technique is compressed into a single warning about heat, passed from one cook to another.