Anchovy Sauce
Melt one-half pint of good, fresh butter and stir in one and one-half dessertspoon of essence of anchovy, and a dash of cayenne pepper. Warm and stir thoroughly and serve with either boiled or fried fish.
A three-ingredient butter sauce that depends entirely on temperature control and on finding a modern stand-in for anchovy essence.
- Keep it below a simmerThe hinge of the recipe is the word "warm." Melted butter held over gentle heat stays glossy and pourable; brought to a boil it separates into oily fat and milk solids and the anchovy turns harsh. Melt slowly and pull the pan off the heat as soon as the essence is stirred through.
- Half a pint of butterThat is one US cup, 8 oz or two sticks — a generous amount, meant for a whole boiled fish at table rather than single plates.
- DessertspoonAn intermediate spoon between teaspoon and tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons. One and a half dessertspoons is about a tablespoon.
- Essence of anchovyA Victorian and Edwardian bottled condiment: anchovies cooked down with vinegar, salt and often spice into a thin, intensely salty brown liquid. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest supermarket equivalent, used in the same quantity; Italian colatura di alici works too, though it is thinner and saltier, so start with less and taste.
- SaltThe original assumes unsalted "fresh" butter — meaning butter not preserved with salt. Modern salted butter plus anchovy essence will read as very salty. Use unsalted.
- CayenneCayenne was a common finishing heat in fish sauces of the period, more a background prickle than a chile note. An eighth of a teaspoon in a cup of butter is about right.
- Yield and servingA cup of sauce serves six to eight alongside fish. Serve it in a warmed sauceboat; it will thicken and cloud as it cools, and reheating it hard will break it.
- If you want it thickerMany contemporaneous cookbooks build anchovy sauce on a butter-and-flour roux thinned with fish stock or milk. This version is deliberately the plain one — a seasoned melted butter, closer to a dressing than a gravy.
Anchovy essence was one of the workhorse bottled flavourings of the nineteenth-century English and American kitchen, sitting on the shelf beside mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire; bottled anchovy essence is still made, though its more familiar relatives today are Gentleman's Relish and the anchovy paste sold in tubes. The taste for anchovy with white fish is old: salted anchovies gave depth and salt to boiled turbot, cod and halibut, whose own flavour is mild, and butter carried it to the plate. That *The Butterick Cook Book* (1911), published by the dress-pattern company as part of its wide-ranging domestic library, includes so terse a version suggests the reader was expected to own a bottle of essence already, and to need only the proportions.