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Anchovy and Caper Sauce
Put some melted butter in a saucepan, dredge in a little flour to thicken, adding season of pepper and salt to taste and a small quantity of nutmeg, then pour in a little vinegar from the capers; mix all well together, and stir in a boned anchovy and a tablespoonful of capers, both chopped very fine. Set the saucepan on the fire, boil the sauce for five minutes, and it is ready for use.
A short English-style butter sauce for poached or boiled fish, written for a cook who already knew the proportions. The gaps are all in quantity, so decide those before you start.
- "Melted butter" means a sauceIn nineteenth-century English usage melted butter is not simply liquid butter but the standard thickened butter sauce. Read the instruction as: melt butter, dredge in flour, cook the roux briefly, then loosen with liquid.
- Working quantitiesAbout 2 tbsp butter to 1 tbsp flour, thinned with roughly a cup of liquid, gives a pourable sauce for four. The recipe names only caper vinegar as liquid, which alone would be far too sharp and far too little; use water, light fish stock or the fish's poaching liquor for the bulk and a teaspoon or two of the caper brine for acidity.
- The anchovyA "boned anchovy" is one salt-cured whole fish, rinsed and filleted. Two oil-packed fillets, mashed, or a scant teaspoon of anchovy paste stands in for it. Chop or crush it fine so it dissolves rather than sitting in threads.
- Salt last, if at allAnchovy, caper brine and capers all bring salt. Season with pepper and nutmeg early, taste at the end, and add salt only if it needs it.
- The five minutesThe recipe stirs in the anchovy and capers first and only then sets the pan on the fire for the five-minute boil. If you would rather not boil them, cook the flour out first and add the anchovy and capers at the end, holding the sauce just below a simmer for a minute or two; hard boiling can drive off the caper perfume and may make the butter split.
- Nutmeg"A small quantity" means a few scrapes of a whole nutmeg, no more. It is a background note in this style of sauce, not a flavour you should be able to name.
- ServingYields about a cup. Intended for boiled or poached white fish, and equally at home on steamed vegetables or roast lamb. Make it immediately before serving, as it thickens and dulls on standing.
Anchovy sauce was a fixture of the English kitchen long before it reached the Waldorf, and Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book carries a great deal of that inheritance alongside its French dishes: the plain flour-and-butter base, the pinch of nutmeg, the assumption that the reader knows what "melted butter" means without being told. Salted anchovies had been used to push savour into bland sauces in English cookery since at least the seventeenth century, and the pairing with capers gives the sharpness that boiled fish otherwise lacks. The habit of seasoning with cured fish is often traced back to Roman garum, though the line between the two is one of resemblance rather than documented descent. What the entry mainly shows is how a hotel kitchen recorded its work: a technique note for a trained cook, with the proportions left to judgment.