Skate, Crimped
INGREDIENTS. -lb. of salt to each gallon of water.
AVERAGE COST, 4d. to 6d. per lb.
Cleanse, skin and cut the fish into slices, which roll and tie round with string. Have SKATE WITH CAPER SAUCE. 379 ready some water highly salted, put in the fish, and boil till it is done. Drain well, remove the string, dish on a hot napkin, and serve with the same sauces as above.
Skate should never be eaten out of season, as it is liable to produce diarrhea and other diseases. It may be dished without a napkin, and the satice poured over.
TIME.-About 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from August to April.
Skate, with Caper Sauce, à la Française. INGREDIENTS.-2 or 3 slices of skate, & pint of vinegar, 2 oz. of salt, teaspoonful of pepper, 1 sliced onion, a small bunch of parsley, 2 bay-leaves, 2 or 3 sprigs of thyme, sufficient water to cover the fish. AVERAGE COST, 4d. to 6d. per lb.
Put in a fish-kettle all the above ingredients and simmer the skate in them till tender. When it is done, skin it neatly, and pour over it some of the liquor in which it has been boiling. Drain it, put it on a hot dish, pour over it caper sauce, and send! some of the latter to table in a tureen.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE from August to April.
Note. Skate may also be served with onion sauce, or parsley and butter.
Skate, Small, Fried. INGREDIENTS. Skate, sufficient vinegar to cover them, salt and pepper to taste, 1 sliced onion, a small bunch of parsley, the juice of 1/2 lemon, hot dripping. AVERAGE COST, 4d. to 6d. per lb.
Cleanse the skate, lay them in a dish, with sufficient vinegar to cover them; add the salt, pepper, onion, parsley and lemonjuice, and let the fish remain in this pickle for 1/2 hour. Then drain them well, flour them, and fry of a nice brown in hot dripping. They may be served either with or without sauce. Skate is not good if dressed too fresh, unless it is crimped; it should, therefore, be kept for a day, but not long enough to produce a disagreeable smell.
TIME.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from August to April.
Three treatments of skate run on from one another here: crimped and boiled, poached in a court-bouillon with caper sauce, and small skate soused in vinegar and fried. All hinge on the same fact — skate is not like other white fish, and its freshness works backwards from what you would expect.
- What crimping meansCrimping is scoring or slicing very fresh fish and plunging it into hard-salted cold water, which contracts the flesh and gives it a firm, almost curdled texture. It only works on fish killed within hours; on a wing bought from a counter it will do nothing but season the water.
- The salt quantityThe brine strength as printed has lost its figure and cannot be recovered from this text; treat the direction as unusable rather than guessing at the original.
- Cooking timeTwenty minutes for rolled slices is longer than skate needs, and the time given for the caper-sauce version has lost its fraction and cannot be read. A wing of ordinary thickness is done in 8 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer, when the flesh slides off the cartilage in ribs. Beyond that it shreds and goes woolly.
- Why it is "not good dressed too fresh"Skate flesh carries urea, which breaks down to ammonia as the fish ages. A day's rest softens the texture, but the same process is what produces the sharp ammoniac smell warned against. If a wing smells of ammonia at all, it is past use; the vinegar soak in the fried version was partly a way of masking that.
- The season noteAugust to April is usually explained by spawning and, more practically, by the difficulty of holding fish in warm weather before refrigeration. The remark about diarrhoea is most likely about spoilage rather than any property of skate itself.
- Fish kettle and court-bouillonThe second recipe is a court-bouillon in all but name: vinegar, onion, parsley, bay and thyme. A wide sauté pan or roasting tin serves for a fish kettle. The vinegar quantity has dropped its fraction and cannot be recovered from the printed text.
- DrippingBeef dripping was widely used for frying and gives an excellent crust, but any fat that will take a hot frying heat will do. Flour alone, as directed, produces a thin coating — dry the fish thoroughly after the vinegar pickle or it will not take.
- Sourcing"Skate" on a modern counter is usually thornback or another small ray. The true common skate is critically endangered and prohibited from landing in several fisheries, so buy by species name rather than by the generic label.
- YieldTwo or three slices, or one large wing, feed two. Allow around 250 g of wing per person, bone in.
Skate was one of the cheap fishes of Victorian London — Beeton's 4d. to 6d. a pound puts it well below turbot or sole — and it was sold in quantity from barrows as well as fishmongers' slabs. Crimping was a fashionable treatment for cod, salmon and skate through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was carried out on the living or newly killed fish, a practice that drew steady objection from animal-welfare writers of the period and had largely disappeared from the trade by the twentieth century. The caper sauce version marked "à la Française" reflects the French kitchen's long fondness for the fish, best known now in raie au beurre noir, where the acidity of capers or vinegar answers the faint ammoniac edge in the flesh — the same logic behind the vinegar pickle in the fried recipe. Beeton's blunt warning that skate out of season "is liable to produce diarrhea" belongs to a period when the household manual was as much a public-health text as a cookbook.