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Udaipur Sauce
Place in a mortar six well-wiped, salted anchovies with a tablespoon capers and pound to a pulp. Add one teaspoon English mustard, teaspoon Worcestershire sauce and teaspoon curry paste or powder, half ounce butter and an egg yolk, pound again until smooth, remove, rub it through fine sieve into a bowl and use as directed.
A pounded cold sauce in the anchovy-butter family, closer to Gentleman's Relish than to anything cooked. It is a seasoning paste, not a pouring sauce, and everything depends on getting it smooth.
- The salted anchovies"Well-wiped, salted anchovies" means whole salt-packed fish, which need rinsing, filleting and boning before pounding; six of them give twelve fillets. Oil-packed fillets from a tin are the practical substitute, and six fillets rather than six fish is closer to the intended salt level.
- English mustardIn a British kitchen of this period that most likely means Colman's, either the dry powder or the made-up paste. If you use powder, mix it with a few drops of cold water and let it stand ten minutes before adding, or the pungency will be muted.
- Curry paste or powderCommercial curry paste of the period was a mild, turmeric-forward Anglo-Indian blend sold by grocers, not a Thai or regional Indian paste. A mild, turmeric-forward curry powder is the nearer match.
- Half ounce butterAbout one tablespoon. Have it properly soft, not melted, or it will not emulsify with the yolk under the pestle.
- The raw yolkThe yolk is never cooked; it binds the paste the way it binds mayonnaise. Use a pasteurised egg if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce covered and cold, no more than two days.
- SievingRubbing through a fine sieve is what separates this from a coarse fish paste, and it catches any small bones missed in the anchovies. A small food processor will do the pounding, but still pass the result through a sieve.
- SaltAdd none. Between the salted anchovies, the capers and the Worcestershire there is more than enough, and the paste concentrates as it sits.
- Yield and useA small quantity, perhaps a quarter to half a cup. "Use as directed" means as a component: whisked into a warm butter sauce for grilled fish, spread thinly on toast under a savoury, or stirred into mayonnaise or melted butter for cold meats. It is too strong to eat by the spoonful.
The name belongs to a broad habit of giving European sauces Indian city names in British and Continental hotel cooking, at a time when commercial curry powder and paste were long-established grocery goods in London and "a touch of curry" signalled worldliness on a menu. Udaipur, in Rajasthan, has no particular association with anchovies: the technique here is entirely European, a mortar-pounded anchovy and caper compound of the sort that also produced anchovy butter, Gentleman's Relish and the various "devilled" pastes. Worcestershire sauce, itself a British commercial product built on fermented anchovy and tamarind and generally traced to Lea & Perrins in the 1830s, is doing much of the same work a second time. Such names generally worked as shorthand for a flavour profile rather than a claim of origin.