Anchovy Sauce
3 anchovies 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 tablespoon catsup Dash of red pepper 1/2 cup boiling water 1 tablespoonful lemon juice Bone the anchovies and pound them to a paste. Melt the butter; stir in the flour and when smooth add the anchovies, pepper and catsup. Mix well; pour the hot water over all: boil two minutes, stirring constantly; add the lemon juice and serve with boiled or baked fish.
A small English-style fish sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux. It comes together in about five minutes, and the only real decisions are what kind of anchovy and what kind of catsup you use.
- The anchovies"Bone the anchovies" tells you the original used whole salt-cured fish, which need rinsing and a soak before pounding. Six oil-packed fillets from a tin stand in for three whole fish; drain them, blot, and mash to a paste with the flat of a knife or a mortar.
- Catsup meant more than tomatoThe recipe does not say which kind, and mushroom and walnut catsups were still in print alongside tomato in this period. Either gives a darker, more savoury result than modern bottled ketchup. Mushroom ketchup is the closer match to the older style; tomato ketchup works but pushes the sauce sweet, so consider cutting the quantity.
- Red pepper"Dash of red pepper" means cayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes. An eighth of a teaspoon is plenty against three anchovies.
- Do not salt itThere is no salt in the ingredient list. Cured anchovies and catsup between them carry most of the seasoning load; taste before you reach for the salt cellar, and expect not to need it.
- ConsistencyA tablespoon each of butter and flour against half a cup of water gives a very thick sauce, closer to a paste once the anchovies go in. Thin it with more boiling water, fish cooking liquor or a little cream until it coats a spoon.
- The two-minute boilThat boil is what cooks the raw flour out of the roux, so do not shorten it. Stir constantly, as instructed, since a small quantity of thick sauce catches on the pan bottom quickly.
- Lemon lastAdd the juice off the heat. Boiling it dulls the brightness that is the whole point of putting it in at the end.
- YieldAbout two-thirds of a cup, which dresses fish for three or four. It thickens further as it stands, so make it while the fish rests rather than in advance.
Anchovy sauce is one of the oldest fixtures of the English fish table, and by the time American cookbooks like this one printed it, it had been standard for well over a century. The taste for salted fermented fish as a seasoning is often traced back to Roman garum, though the direct line to the Georgian and Victorian kitchen runs through bottled essence of anchovy and the various commercial fish sauces sold by grocers, of which the anchovy paste sold as Gentleman's Relish is the best-known survivor. The recipe's structure -- roux, liquid, a spoonful of ketchup, a dash of cayenne, lemon at the finish -- is the standard drawn-butter sauce of the period with a savoury addition, and the same skeleton appears under other names depending on whether egg, parsley, capers or oysters go in.