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Sauce for Broiled Fish
(Salsa per pesce in gratella) This sauce is composed of yolks of eggs, salted anchovies, olive oil and lemon juice. Boil the eggs in their shell for ten minutes and for every hard yolk take one large anchovy or two small.
Bone the anchovies and rub them on the sieve together with the hard (or semi-hard) yolks, and dissolve all with oil and lemon juice to reduce it like a cream. Cover with this sauce the broiled fish before sending to the table, or serve aside in a gravy boat. 57
A cold emulsion of hard yolk and anchovy, thinned with oil and lemon — closer to a rough aioli than a dressing. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how finely the yolk and fish are pushed through the sieve.
- Push it through, don't chop itThe sieve is not optional: yolk forced through a fine mesh with the back of a spoon becomes a powder that takes up oil smoothly, while chopped or mashed yolk stays grainy and the sauce breaks into oily flecks. A drum sieve or the finest disc of a food mill does the job; a food processor tends to make it pasty rather than light.
- Ten minutes for the eggsTen minutes at a simmer gives a fully set but still moist yolk, which is what the recipe wants — note the aside about "semi-hard" yolks, which emulsify better than the chalky, over-boiled kind. Cool the eggs in cold water so the yolk does not go grey at the edge.
- Salted anchoviesThe original means whole anchovies packed in salt, sold in tins at Italian grocers; they must be rinsed, soaked briefly and filleted off the backbone. Oil-packed fillets substitute directly — reckon two fillets per "large anchovy", and do not add salt until you have tasted.
- Proportions for the oil and lemonNone are given. For four yolks and four large anchovies, start with about 1/3 cup olive oil added in a slow trickle and the juice of half a lemon, adjusting until it falls thickly from the spoon. Too much lemon at once will thin it past recovery.
- YieldFour yolks make roughly 3/4 cup of sauce, enough for four to six portions of fish. It is assertive; a spoonful per plate is plenty.
- Serve it cool, on hot fishThe sauce is made and served cold; warming it will only separate the oil. Spoon it over the fish at the last moment or pass it in a sauceboat, as the recipe suggests, so the emulsion does not sit and slacken on a hot plate.
- Which fishThe recipe says only 'broiled fish'. It suits plain grilled fish with some backbone of flavour — mackerel, sardines, swordfish, or a whole sea bass. On very delicate white fish the anchovy can overwhelm.
- KeepingCooked egg yolk in an oil emulsion is best eaten the day it is made; refrigerate it and it stiffens, so let it stand at room temperature and loosen it with a few drops of lemon before serving.
The Italian Cook Book (1919) was Maria Gentile's English-language compilation; a debt to Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina is often suggested but is not established, and the bare numeral at the end of this entry appears to be a reference number of the kind used through the book. Sauces built on pounded salt anchovy, hard yolk and oil are old in the Italian repertoire and belong to the same broad family as salsa verde and the anchovy-and-caper dressings of Piedmont and Liguria. Salt fish, eggs and olive oil were pantry staples, and a grilled fish could be lifted without a cooked flour-and-butter sauce and the fire time it demanded. The recipe offers the sauce either poured over the fish or handed separately in a gravy boat.