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Skate Stew
Put the fins, skin, trimmings of skate into water enough to cook them, with pepper and salt and simmer for half an hour. Strain it through a fine sieve. Make a brown sauce of butter and flour, pepper, salt, adding a little milk, about a teacupful for a pound of skate, then squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and if you have it, a glass of white wine. Take the skate, cut it in pieces, simmer it in salted water; when cooked, strain away the water, dish the fish, pouring over it the above sauce. Decorate with strips of lemon peel laid in a lattice-work down the center.
A thrifty two-stage dish: the skate's cartilage-rich trimmings make a quick fumet, and the fish itself is poached separately and sauced. The one thing the original leaves out is how briefly skate needs to cook.
- Buy it fresh, and smell itSkate develops an ammonia odour as it ages, because urea in the flesh breaks down. A faint whiff will wash out under cold running water with a little lemon or vinegar; a strong one means the fish is past use. Skate is also often better a day after landing, when it firms up.
- Cooking time for the fishThe half hour given here applies to the trimmings for stock, not to the wing. Pieces of skate wing poached in salted water are done in 6 to 10 minutes depending on thickness -- the flesh should just come away from the cartilage in strands. Longer and it turns woolly.
- "A teacupful"In British cookery of this period a teacupful is usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, some 5 fl oz, though usage varied; here it is measured per pound of fish. The recipe does not say what becomes of the strained trimming stock, but the sensible reading is that it goes into the sauce alongside the milk.
- The brown sauceButter and flour cooked to a nut-brown roux, then loosened with the milk, and with the strained trimming stock if you use it as the sauce liquid. Cook the roux until it smells toasted, or the sauce tastes of raw flour, and add the liquid gradually off the heat to keep it smooth.
- Lemon and wine lastAdd the lemon juice and the glass of white wine after the sauce has thickened, and let it simmer a minute or two to lose the raw edge of the wine. Acid added early can make a milk-based sauce look curdled.
- Strips of lemon peelPare the zest with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, and cut into thin bands for the lattice. Blanching them for a minute in boiling water softens them and takes out the bitterness.
- YieldReckon on 6 to 8 oz of trimmed skate wing per person, so a pound with its sauce serves two as a main course. Boiled or steamed potatoes suit it.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had come to England after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief work -- which explains the frugality on show here, where the fins, skin and trimmings become the base of the sauce. Skate, cheap and abundant in the North Sea, is a staple of the Flemish and French coastal kitchen, best known in the form raie au beurre noir, skate with black butter and capers. Its wings are cartilage rather than bone, which is why the trimmings give up so much body to a stock in half an hour, and why the cooked flesh pulls off in neat ribbons. The lattice of lemon peel down the centre is a reminder that even a relief cookbook expected a dish to be sent to table looking composed.