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Fish Sauce
One-quarter of a pound of fresh butter; one tablespoon of finely chopped parsley, a little salt and pepper and the juice of two lemons. Cream the butter; mix all well together, adding at the least a teaspoon of mayonaise. Less lemon juice may be used if preferred.
This is a compound butter — a cold sauce that melts over hot fish rather than a cooked one. The whole thing depends on the butter staying soft but never oily.
- Quarter pound of butterThat is one stick, 4 oz or 115 g. Let it come to cool room temperature; if it gets too warm before you beat it, the mixture goes oily rather than creamy.
- "Cream the butter"Beat it alone until pale and light before anything else goes in. Lemon juice added to cold hard butter tends to sit in watery streaks instead of blending; you will have to warm it a little and beat again.
- Juice of two lemonsTwo supermarket lemons can give 6 tablespoons, which will loosen a single stick of butter badly. Start with the juice of one, taste, and add more. The recipe's own note about using less is worth taking seriously.
- The mayonnaiseA teaspoon helps the acid stay suspended in the fat; the recipe asks for at least that much. Bottled mayonnaise works; if you make your own it will contain raw egg, so use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone vulnerable.
- SeasoningSalt to taste once the lemon is in. White pepper rather than black keeps the sauce looking clean, though the recipe only says pepper.
- ServingRoll the finished butter in parchment into a log, chill until firm, and cut coins to lay on hot grilled or fried fish at the table. It can also simply be spooned soft over the fillets.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup depending on how much lemon goes in — enough for four to six portions of fish. It keeps several days refrigerated, or up to three months frozen.
Compound butters like this are the plainest branch of the sauce family: fat, acid, herb, seasoning, no cooking and no roux. French kitchens of the period called the lemon-and-parsley version beurre maître d'hôtel, and it spread through English and American household books as the standard accompaniment to broiled or fried fish, where a flour-thickened sauce would have muddied the flavour. The teaspoon of mayonnaise here is the domestic touch — a shortcut to a stable emulsion. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women and is generally cited as the first Canadian community cookbook, which explains the chatty section headings.