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Fennel Sauce (for Mackerel)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for 4 mackerel. pint of melted butter, rather more than 1 tablespoonful of chopped fennel. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Make the melted butter very smooth, chop the fennel rather small, carefully FINANCIÈRE SAUCE.
This is a two-ingredient finish for grilled or boiled mackerel, and it stands or falls on the base sauce. "Melted butter" in a Victorian English book is not clarified butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a thin béchamel made with water or milk.
- "Melted butter" means a made sauceIn Victorian English books this is butter thickened with a little flour and let down with water or milk, seasoned and simmered until it loses the raw flour taste; it is not clarified butter. Proportions vary from book to book, so follow the melted butter recipe in this volume rather than a modern equal-weight roux. Plain melted butter with fennel stirred in will separate and taste greasy.
- The quantity of butter sauceThe amount of melted butter given here has lost its fraction in the original; half a pint (an imperial half-pint, about 284 ml or 1¼ US cups) is the usual measure for four fish and is what the tablespoonful of fennel is scaled to.
- Fennel means the herbChop the feathery fronds of fennel, not the bulb. Common fennel leaf is what was grown in kitchen gardens; dill fronds are the closest substitute if fennel leaf is unavailable, though the flavour is less aniseed.
- Add the herb off the heatStir the chopped fennel in at the last moment and do not let the sauce boil afterwards. Prolonged heat turns the fronds khaki and drives off the volatile anise oils that are the whole point.
- SmoothnessCook the flour and butter together for a minute or two before adding liquid, add the liquid warm and in stages, and whisk. If it goes lumpy, pass it through a sieve rather than beating harder.
- SeasoningThe original assumes salt in the melted butter. A little lemon juice or a spoonful of the mackerel's cooking liquor sharpens it against the oily fish.
- YieldHalf a pint of sauce dresses four mackerel, allowing about four to five tablespoons a portion. It does not reheat well; make it while the fish cooks.
Fennel with mackerel is one of the oldest fixed pairings in English cookery, recorded in printed cookbooks well before Beeton and often explained by the fish itself: mackerel is very oily and spoils faster than almost any other fish landed in Britain, so it was eaten close to the coast and close to the hour, with a sharp green herb said by tradition to cut the richness. Fennel grows readily on southern English cliffs and in kitchen gardens, and the same logic put gooseberry sauce alongside mackerel in the same period. The base here, "melted butter," was the workhorse sauce of the Victorian English kitchen exture that French cooks of the era mocked, and onto which the household books hung dozens of variations by adding parsley, anchovy, capers, eggs or, as here, a single chopped herb.