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Fish Sauce Without Butter
330. Simmer very gently a quarter of a pint of vinegar, and half a pint of water (which must not be hard), and then add an onion, half a handful of horseradish, and the following spices lightly bruised. four cloves, two blades of mace, and a half tea-spoonful of black pepper. When the onion is quite tender, chop it small with two anchovies, and set the whole on the fire to boil for a few minutes, with a spoonful of ketchup. In the mean time, have ready and well beaten the yolks of three fresh eggs; strain them, mix the liquor by degrees with them, and when well mixed set the saucepan over a gentle fire, keeping a basin in one hand, into which toss the sauce to and fro, and shake the saucepan over the fire that the eggs may not curdle. Do not boil them, only let the sauce be hot enough to give it the thickness of melted butter.
An egg-thickened vinegar sauce from the era when "melted butter" was the default English sauce for fish. The whole thing hinges on the eggs: they must thicken without ever reaching a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg yolks in an acid liquid set somewhere around 160-175F, and above that they scramble. Keep the pan over the lowest heat and pull it off entirely whenever it feels warmer than a hot bath; the tossing back and forth between pan and basin is simply a way of cooling and aerating it constantly.
- MeasuresThese are imperial pints of 20 fl oz, so a quarter pint of vinegar is 5 fl oz and half a pint of water is 10 fl oz — roughly 2/3 cup and 1 1/4 cups US.
- Water that is not hardHard water was thought to toughen onion and dull the flavour of infusions. Filtered or bottled still water answers; the vinegar dominates in any case.
- Ketchup means mushroom or walnutIn nineteenth-century English cookery a "spoonful of ketchup" is mushroom ketchup or walnut ketchup — dark, thin, salty, closer to a soy or Worcestershire note. Tomato ketchup would make an entirely different and much sweeter sauce.
- AnchoviesThe original means whole salted anchovies. Two oil-packed fillets, drained and mashed, are the nearest equivalent; if using salt-packed, rinse them first or the sauce will be too salty once reduced.
- Blades of maceMace blades are the dried aril of the nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops. If only ground mace is available, a small pinch will stand in, though the equivalence is only approximate; strain the infusion through muslin afterwards.
- Strain the yolksStraining beaten yolks removes the chalazae, which would show as white threads in a pale sauce. Worth doing, and it also catches any shell.
- Tempering"Mix the liquor by degrees with them" means adding the hot spiced vinegar to the yolks a spoonful at a time, whisking hard, before the mixture goes anywhere near heat. Reversing the order risks curdling.
- If it splitsA sauce that begins to grain can sometimes be rescued by taking it off the heat at once and whisking in a tablespoon of cold water. Once it is properly scrambled it cannot be brought back.
"Melted butter" — flour, water and butter beaten smooth — was so nearly universal on English fish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it drew comment from foreign visitors, and a recipe titling itself without butter is defining itself against that habit. What replaces the butter here is egg yolk, worked into a spiced vinegar infusion in much the manner of the Dutch sauce printed in English books of the period, a sauce related to hollandaise. The flavourings — anchovy, mace, cloves, horseradish, a spoonful of mushroom ketchup — are the standard English fish-sauce vocabulary of the period, of a piece with the bottled sauces then sold commercially. The trick of shaking the pan over the fire while tossing the sauce into a basin held in the other hand is a pre-thermometer solution to a temperature problem: with no way to measure the heat, the cook simply never let the mixture rest long enough to overtake her.