Sardine Sauce
INGREDIENTS for sauce for moderate-sized dish of fish.-6 sardines, 1 oz. of butter, the rind of 1 lemon, 1 shalot, 1 pint of gravy or stock, a bay-leaf, salt, pepper, a grate of nutmeg, flour.
AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Bone and chop up the sardines, put the bones into a saucepan with the other ingredients, with the butter worked into a ball with flour, and boil for 15 minutes; then strain over the chopped fish.
TIME.-15 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A brown fish sauce built on stock rather than milk, thickened with kneaded butter and flour. The method is unusual in that the sardine bones and trimmings flavour the liquid while the flesh is added only at the end.
- The hingeThe sauce is strained over the chopped sardine flesh, which is never boiled. Cooking the flesh in the liquid breaks it into gritty threads and dulls the flavour; the residual heat of the sauce is enough.
- 1 pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups. It will reduce somewhat over 15 minutes of boiling.
- Gravy or stockBeeton's "gravy" is a strong brown meat stock, not thickened pan gravy from a roast. A good beef or veal stock works; a light fish stock gives a cleaner but much less characteristic result.
- SardinesMost likely tinned sardines in oil, which were widely sold in Victorian Britain; six is roughly one small tin. Drain them, lift the fillets from the backbone, and reserve every bone, tail and scrap of skin for the pan.
- Butter worked into a ball with flourBeurre manié: 1 oz butter kneaded cold with about the same volume of flour, roughly 2 tablespoons, and added to the pan in small pieces. Beeton gives no flour quantity, so judge by the finished consistency.
- Lemon rindPare it in strips with a peeler and take no white pith, which turns bitter over a quarter-hour boil. Remove it with the rest of the solids at straining.
- ShalotOne shallot, peeled and split. It is a flavouring only and goes out with the strainer.
- Yield and servingEnough for four to six portions of plain boiled, baked or grilled white fish. Season at the end, after reduction, and serve hot but not re-boiled.
Sardine sauce belongs to a family of late-Victorian sauces built around tinned fish, which had become cheap and widely available by the later nineteenth century. The average cost of tenpence tells you this was a modest household dish, and the instruction to simmer the bones and reserve the flesh shows the period's habit of extracting flavour from every part of a small ingredient. Naming a sauce for its principal flavouring rather than its method or its inventor was standard practice in the English kitchen of the time, and the book's alphabetical arrangement is full of such entries — anchovy, lobster, shrimp, oyster — older sauces, most of them predating tinned fish, all variations on the idea that a strong stock plus a preserved fish makes a serviceable accompaniment to something plainer. The thickening with kneaded butter is a long-established English technique, though flour-and-butter liaisons and the cooked roux have long, overlapping histories.