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Anchovy Butter Sauce
Beat up a piece of anchovy butter the size of a small egg in one pint of good brown sauce, warm over a slow fire, and stir in the juice of half a lemon, or more, according to taste. This sauce goes well with baked fish.
A compound-butter finish on a classic brown sauce, written for a kitchen that always had both components on hand. The whole dish depends on how you handle the last two minutes.
- Never let it boilOnce the butter goes in, the sauce should be warmed only to serving temperature — hot to the finger, no more. A boil breaks the butter out of suspension and turns the anchovy flat and fishy rather than savoury.
- "A piece the size of a small egg"Roughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. In a pint of sauce that is a restrained amount; the anchovy should read as depth rather than as fish.
- Anchovy butterNot a supermarket item. Mash 4-6 oil-packed anchovy fillets, or a teaspoon of anchovy paste, into 4 oz softened unsalted butter, press through a sieve if you want it smooth, and chill firm. The recipe assumes it is already to hand.
- Good brown sauceEspagnole, or a demi-glace: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A reduced beef or veal stock thickened lightly with a brown roux will stand in. Bottled gravy will not.
- SaltSeason only at the very end, if at all. Both the anchovy and a reduced brown sauce carry salt, and the sauce concentrates as it warms.
- The lemonAdd it in stages — half a lemon into a pint is the floor, and the acid is what keeps the butter and the brown sauce from tasting heavy together. The original stirs it in as the sauce warms; keeping the heat low matters more than the exact moment.
- YieldA pint sauces six to eight portions of baked fish generously. It does not reheat well; make what you will use.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook by trade, but the book under his name, a compilation drawing heavily on existing printed sources, sets down dishes in the manner of the hotel's kitchen, and this sauce is pure late-nineteenth-century French method as practised in an American grand hotel. Compound butters (beurres composés) beaten into a finished sauce at the last moment were standard in the Carême-to-Escoffier line of cooking: the butter enriches, gloss appears, and a single flavouring is carried into the sauce without cooking it. Anchovy in particular had a long life in English and Anglo-American kitchens as a background savoury note rather than a declared ingredient, arriving variously as essence, paste, or bottled sauce; the fish course at a hotel of this period would have expected exactly this kind of dark, sharp, buttered accompaniment. The instruction to warm "over a slow fire" is a coal-range phrase, and it is usually taken to mean something close to what a modern cook means by a low burner setting.