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Anchovy Sauce
Take three or four filleted anchovies, and beat them in a mortar with three ounces of butter. Put this anchovy butter into a stewpan with a wineglassful of water, two teaspoonfuls of vinegar and a tablespoonful of flour previously rubbed down smooth with water. Stir over the fire until it thickens, and then rub it through a coarse hair-sieve.
A butter-and-flour sauce for boiled or broiled fish, closer to a loose anchovy compound butter than to a modern velouté. The proportions are very rich and very short on liquid, so the main decisions are about salt and consistency.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this era a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup); a few writers stretch it to 4. With 3 ounces of butter and a tablespoon of flour, 1/4 cup of water plus the vinegar gives a very stiff, clinging sauce, so expect to thin it.
- Consistency is the hingeA tablespoon of flour against this little water will thicken to a very heavy, clinging sauce. Thin with fish stock, milk or the fish's cooking liquid until it coats a spoon, adding it off the heat in stages so the butter does not break.
- StewpanA shallow, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any heavy 1-quart saucepan does; the heavy base matters more than the shape, since butter and flour scorch quickly.
- The anchoviesSalt-packed anchovies were the norm in 1896 and need rinsing and, if very hard, a soak. Oil-packed fillets work directly, drained. Either way, taste before adding any salt at all -- the sauce will already be assertive.
- MortarA small food processor or the flat of a knife on a board reduces the fillets to paste faster. The point is that no fibres survive to be caught in the sieve.
- Hair sieveA horsehair sieve was used because tinned wire discoloured acidic and eggy mixtures. A fine-mesh stainless strainer is the equivalent; push through with a small ladle while the sauce is still hot and loose.
- HeatStir over medium-low heat only until it thickens, a couple of minutes. A hard boil separates the butter and leaves a greasy film on the surface.
- YieldRoughly 2/3 to 3/4 cup as written -- enough for four modest servings alongside poached cod, halibut, turbot or boiled potatoes. Vinegar rather than lemon gives it the sharp, old-fashioned edge.
Anchovy sauce was one of the standard English fish sauces carried into American hotel kitchens, and it appears in this book among the plain working preparations of the Waldorf pantry rather than the showpieces. Anchovies functioned in nineteenth-century cooking much as a bottled savoury sauce does now: a concentrated source of salt and umami, sold as salted fillets, as essence, or worked into a butter that could be kept and dropped onto grilled meat or whisked into a sauce at the last minute. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the recipes he collected under his name in 1896 read like a house reference book -- brief, assuming a cook who already knows how thick a fish sauce should be. The hair sieve in the last line dates the page as clearly as anything: fine wire mesh existed, but tinned iron reacted with vinegar, and horsehair remained the safe choice for anything acidic well into the century.