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Anchovy Sauce
(Salsa d'Acciughe) This recipe does not call for the filets of anchovies prepared for hors d'œuvre, but the less expensive and larger whole anchovies in salt to be had in bulk or cans at large dealers. Wash them thoroughly in plenty of water. Remove head, toil, backbone and skin and they are ready for use.
Put five or six anchovies into a colander and dip quickly into boiling water to loosen the skins, remove the salt, skin and bone them. Chop them and put over the fire in a saucepan with a generous quantity of oil and some pepper. Do not let them boil, but when they are hot add two tablespoons of butter and three or four tablespoons of concentrated tomato juice made by cooking down canned tomatoes and rubbing through a sieve. When this sauce is used to season spaghetti, these must be boiled in water that is only slightly salted and care must be taken not to let them become too soft. The quantities above mentioned ought to be sufficient for about one pound of spaghetti.
A five-minute pan sauce whose whole character rests on the anchovies dissolving rather than frying. Everything else is adjustable.
- Never let it boilAnchovies held below a simmer melt into the oil and become savory; brought to a boil they seize, turn grainy and go harshly salty. Keep the pan at the point where the oil just shimmers and stir until the fish has broken down.
- Salt-packed anchoviesThese are still sold, in tins of various sizes or loose by weight at Italian grocers, and they are what the recipe is built around. Soak them in cold water 10-20 minutes rather than a quick rinse, then rub off skin and lift out the backbone with a thumbnail; a hot-water dip works but softens the flesh.
- If you only have oil-packed filletsUse about 10-12 fillets in place of the five or six whole fish, since each whole anchovy yields two fillets. Drain them, and taste the sauce before salting the pasta water, as oil-packed fillets can carry as much salt as rinsed salt-packed ones.
- "Toil" is a typoThe original means head, tail, backbone and skin. Nothing else is intended.
- Concentrated tomato juiceCooking down canned tomatoes and sieving them gives roughly what is sold today as passata reduced by half, or thin out about 1 tablespoon of tomato paste with a little water. Three or four tablespoons is a seasoning, not a tomato sauce; the dish should stay slick and pale orange.
- "A generous quantity of oil"Genuinely unspecified. For a pound of pasta, 1/3 to 1/2 cup of olive oil suits the butter that follows, since the oil is the sauce body.
- Lightly salted pasta waterThe instruction is deliberate and worth following: the sauce carries a great deal of salt from the fish. Use about half the salt you normally would, and finish the drained pasta in the pan with a splash of the cooking water to bind it.
- YieldOne pound of spaghetti dressed this way serves four as a main course, six as a first course in the Italian pattern the book assumes.
Salted anchovies were one of the cheapest sources of savor in Italian cooking for centuries, packed in barrels in Liguria, Sicily and Campania and sold loose by weight long before the neat oil-packed fillet became a delicatessen item. The distinction the recipe opens with is an economic one: filets "prepared for hors d'œuvre" were a luxury purchase, while whole salted fish in bulk were pantry stock -- the recipe itself points the reader to "large dealers" for them. The small quantity of "concentrated tomato juice" is characteristic of the period as well, when tomato appeared as an accent to sauces rather than their base, and conserva or estratto was cooked down to a paste and used by the spoonful. Maria Gentile's book was published in New York in 1919.