Skate, Boiled
INGREDIENTS.-1 lh. of salt to each gallon of water. AVERAGE CosT, 4d. to 6d. per lb.
Cleanse and skin the skate, lay it in a fish-kettle, with sufficient water to cover it, salted in the above proportion. Let it simmer very gently till done; then dish it on a hot napkin, and serve with shrimp, lobster, or caper sauce.
Time.-According to size, from 1/2 to 1/4 hour.
SEASONABLE from August to April.
A short entry that assumes you know what a fish-kettle is and how long fish takes. Two things need correcting: the salt and the time.
- The salt measure"1 lh." is a typesetting error for 1 lb. of salt to each gallon of water. The cooking time was checked against the printed page and stands as given here.
- That brine is very strongA pound of salt per imperial gallon is roughly 100 g per litre — about a 10 per cent solution, some three times as salty as seawater. For a wing you are poaching for a few minutes, 25-30 g of salt per litre seasons the flesh perfectly well without turning it into salt fish.
- Half an hour will ruin itSkate wing is thin and cooks through very fast. A wing of 350-450 g is done in 8-12 minutes at a bare tremble, and it is ready when the flesh slides cleanly off the cartilage in strands. The Victorian half-hour to hour applies at best to a whole small skate, and even then it is generous.
- Fish-kettleA long, lidded pan with a perforated lifting trivet, made so a whole fish could be raised out unbroken. A wide sauté pan or roasting tin on the hob does the same job; slide the wing onto a wide spatula or lift it on a fold of muslin.
- Buying and the ammonia questionSkate carries urea in its flesh, which converts to ammonia as it ages. A faint whiff on very fresh fish disappears in cooking; a strong one means the fish is past it. Skate is often said to be held a day or two before sale to improve the texture, but do not hold it further at home.
- SkinningAsk the fishmonger to skin the wings — the skin is tough and abrasive, and it comes away far more easily on fresh fish and with the right knife. Poached skin-on wings can be skinned after cooking, but the flesh tears.
- The hot napkinA folded linen cloth laid on the serving dish to blot the poaching liquid, so the sauce is not thinned. A warmed plate and a moment's draining does it now.
- Sauces and quantityCaper sauce is the classic partner, and beurre noisette with capers and a squeeze of lemon is the version that has survived. Allow one wing of 350-450 g per person, or about 200 g of trimmed wing each from a larger fish.
- SeasonAugust to April reflects both quality and the pre-refrigeration calendar. Note that several skate and ray species are now under catch restrictions in the UK and EU; buy thornback or another species your fishmonger can name, rather than unspecified "skate."
Skate and ray were cheap fish in Victorian Britain — Beeton's fourpence to sixpence a pound puts it well below turbot or salmon — and they turn up in cookbooks mainly boiled, crimped or fried in batter, usually with a sharp sauce to cut the slightly gelatinous flesh. The pairing with capers or shrimp is often explained, at least in retrospect, as more than decorative: the acidity and salt are said to counteract the faint ammoniacal note that skate develops, and the same logic is generally invoked for the vinegar in a fish-shop portion of skate and chips, though the Victorians themselves left no such rationale on record. What the entry shows most clearly is the period's confidence in long simmering, a habit inherited from an era of unreliable heat and whole fish, which modern practice has abandoned for anything as thin as a wing. The status of the fish has since reversed: once a working-class staple, several skate and ray populations were heavily depleted through the twentieth century, and the common skate is now a prohibited species that may not be retained in UK and EU waters.