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Liver Sauce (Ketchup If it is desired)
ketchup. If it is desired richer, a little cream should be put, instead of all milk. This will do for fish sauce, with the addition of a little anchovy; and if oyster, shrimp, or lobster sauce is required, leave out the anchovy.
AN EXCELLENT SAUCE FOR CARP OR BOILED TURKEY. 298. Rub two ounces of butter with a tea-spoonful of flour, put to it a little water, melt it, and add nearly a quarter of a pint of thick cream and half an anchovy chopped fine, not washed; set it over the fire, and as it boils up add a large spoonful of real India soy; if that does not give it a fine colour put a little more; turn it into the sauce tureen, and put some salt and half a lemon; stir it well to hinder it from curdling.
Recipe 298 is a short, sharp cream sauce built on butter, anchovy and soy — closer to a modern pan sauce than to the flour-heavy Victorian melted butter it sits among. It comes together in a few minutes and is easily broken, so read the last line first.
- Add the acid last, off the heatLemon juice hitting boiling cream will split it. Take the pan off the heat, let it stop bubbling, then stir the juice in gradually. The instruction to "stir it well to hinder it from curdling" is the hinge of the whole recipe.
- Quarter of a pint of creamAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 2/3 cup. Use heavy or double cream; single cream or half-and-half will curdle far more readily once the lemon goes in.
- Two ounces of butter to one teaspoon of flourThat is a very loose ratio by modern roux standards — the flour is there only to stabilise, not to thicken. The body comes from the cream reducing. Expect a pourable sauce, not a coating one.
- "Not washed"Salt-cured anchovies were often rinsed of their brine before use, and the instruction here suggests the salt is deliberately wanted. If you are using oil-packed fillets, one mashed to a paste is roughly half a barrel anchovy, and you should hold back the added salt until you have tasted.
- Real India soySoy sauce, imported through the East India trade and sold in bottles as "India soy." A dark soy or a Chinese light soy both work; the recipe is using it as much for colour as for savour, which is why it tells you to add more if the sauce looks pale. Start with a scant tablespoon.
- Half a lemonThe juice, not the fruit. Squeeze it, strain out the pips, and add to taste — with soy and unwashed anchovy already in the pan the sauce is well seasoned before the lemon arrives.
- CarpFarmed carp is hard to find in much of the English-speaking world and can be muddy. The sauce suits any firm, plain-poached freshwater or white fish, and its original alternative — boiled turkey — is better served today by poached or roast turkey breast.
- YieldAbout 3/4 cup, enough for four servings as a table sauce. It does not reheat well; make it while the fish rests.
Anchovy, soy and cream is a distinctly Georgian-into-Victorian combination, and the phrase "real India soy" points to the sauce's ancestry: soy sauce reached British tables through East India Company shipping from the later seventeenth century onward and remained a relatively expensive bottled condiment into the nineteenth, valued as much for darkening and deepening a sauce as for its own flavour. Adulterated or imitation soy was a recognised complaint of the period, which may explain the insistence on the "real" article. The pairing of the sauce with carp is a reminder of how important pond and river fish were to English cookery before rail transport made sea fish cheap inland — carp was a stock-pond fish, often criticised for muddiness, and a rich, salty, dark sauce was a common remedy.