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Anchovy Sauce (for Fish)
INGREDIENTS.-4 anchovies, 1 oz. of butter, pint of melted butter, cayenne to taste.
AVERAGE COST for 1/2 pint, 6d.
ANCHOVY TOAST.
Bone the anchovies, and pound them to a paste, with 1 oz. of butter. Make the melted butter hot, stir in the pounded anchovies and cayenne; simmer for 3 or 4 minutes; and, if liked, add a squeeze of lemon-juice. A more general and expeditious way of making this sauce is to stir in 1½ tablespoonful of anchovy essence to 1/2 pint of melted butter, and to add seasoning to taste. Boil the whole up for 1 minute, and serve hot.
TIME.-5 minutes.
Anchovy Toast. I. - INGREDIENTS. -2 or 3 slices of bread, butter for frying, anchovy paste, cayenne.
Toast and butter the bread, or fry it in the butter and cut off the crust. Spread it with the paste and give it a seasoning of cayenne. Serve very hot.
Anchovy Toast. II.-INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 3 persons.-Stale bread, 6 anchovies, butter for frying, cayenne.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Cut the bread one third of an inch thick into little squares and fry them a bright brown, bone and fillet the anchovies and lay them on and sprinkle over a few grains of cayenne. Serve very hot.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Three related items run together here: a sauce for boiled or fried fish, and two versions of anchovy toast. The one thing that trips up modern readers is the phrase "melted butter", which in Beeton does not mean butter that has been melted.
- "Melted butter" is a flour-thickened sauce"Melted butter" in Victorian usage means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not butter that has simply been melted: butter and a little flour cooked together, then let down with water and simmered smooth. Beeton's own proportions are butter-heavy rather than an equal-weight roux, so treat any ratio as approximate. Plain melted butter is much less likely to hold the anchovy.
- Imperial pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so the half pint here is 10 fl oz, a generous cup and a quarter.
- Anchovy essenceThe shortcut ingredient was a thin bottled anchovy extract, sold then as now as anchovy essence. Anchovy paste from a tube can stand in, using rather less, as modern paste is thicker.
- SaltSalted anchovies in a flour-based sauce may well need no added salt; taste before adding any. The recipe itself asks only for cayenne, an optional squeeze of lemon-juice, and "seasoning to taste" in the quicker version.
- Boning the anchoviesThe instruction assumes whole salted anchovies from a barrel, which need rinsing, splitting and the backbone drawn out. Tinned fillets in oil are already boned; drain them and mash with the butter.
- TimingThree or four minutes' simmering is to dissolve the pounded fish into the sauce, not to cook it. Once it looks uniform, stop. Prolonged boiling drives off the aroma and can make the sauce grainy.
- Cayenne"A few grains" is literal on the toast version: this is a seasoning accent on an already assertive ingredient, not a chilli heat. Start with a pinch under a quarter teaspoon for the whole pint of sauce.
- The toastsVersion I is bread toasted and buttered (or fried in butter), crust cut off, spread with the paste; version II is fried squares of bread about a third of an inch thick with boned fillets laid over. Both are to be served "very hot". Version II is given as sufficient for 3 persons using 6 anchovies, two fillets a head.
Anchovy in one form or another turns up all through nineteenth-century English cookery as a household source of savoury depth, the role soy sauce or stock concentrate plays now. Salted anchovies came in from the Mediterranean by the barrel, and bottled anchovy essence made the flavour available to any kitchen without the work of boning and pounding. Anchovy sauce was a standard partner to plainly cooked white fish, while anchovy toast belongs to the savoury, the small hot salty course served towards the end of a formal Victorian dinner, after the sweet and before the dessert fruit -- a course that has largely vanished from English meals but survives in the habit of anchovy paste on toast at teatime. The "average cost" figures of sixpence and ninepence are a reminder of what Beeton's book was for: it was addressed to a mistress of a household managing a budget and a cook, and price per dish mattered as much as method.