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Anchovy Sauce (Easy way of making anchovy)
An easy way of making anchovy sauce is to stir three teaspoonfuls of prepared essence or paste of anchovy, which may be bought at your grocer's, into one pint melted butter; let the sauce boil ten minutes and flavor with lemon juice.
A three-line sauce that depends entirely on knowing what "melted butter" meant in 1900 — not butter that has been melted, but a flour-thickened butter sauce closer to a modern white sauce.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not an ingredientIn nineteenth-century English and American books, melted butter usually means butter and flour cooked together and whisked with water or light stock until smooth. Proportions differ a good deal from book to book, from a couple of tablespoons of each per pint to as much as a quarter-pound of butter to half a pint of liquid. A pint of plain melted butter with anchovy stirred through it would be something quite different from what is intended here.
- A pintTwo cups, about 475 ml if the measure is American, 568 ml if imperial; the recipe does not say which. It is a generous quantity for a table of several people, and halves without trouble.
- Anchovy essence and pasteAnchovy paste in a tube is the direct survivor and still sold. Essence was the thinner, pourable preparation; if using a bottled anchovy sauce rather than paste, start with two teaspoons and taste. Three mashed oil-packed fillets are a fair substitute for three teaspoons of paste.
- The ten-minute boilMost likely aimed at the flour rather than the anchovy, to cook out the raw starch taste. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir; a hard boil in a thin pan will catch and scorch.
- SaltAdd none until the end. Anchovy paste is heavily salted, and if the sauce is built on stock rather than water it will need nothing at all.
- The lemonOff the heat, and start with a teaspoon. Its job is to cut the salt and the fat, not to make the sauce taste of lemon.
- ServingAnchovy sauce was long associated with boiled and baked fish, and with mutton. It thickens as it stands; slacken it with a spoonful of hot water before it goes to the table.
Anchovy in some preserved form was one of the great background flavours of British cookery from the eighteenth century onward, reaching the kitchen as essence, paste, or bottled sauce, and standing in for the fermented fish seasonings often said to run through European cooking in a line traced back to Roman garum. By the time this book was compiled, the phrase "which may be bought at your grocer's" was doing real work: the appeal of the recipe is that a cook no longer had to pound salted fish in a mortar and strain the result, because a manufacturer had done it. The base sauce, "melted butter," was so standard in English kitchens that it had its own recipe in Beeton and in many other nineteenth-century books, with the proportions varying from writer to writer.