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Anchovy Sauce (Make the butter sauce and stir)
Make the butter sauce and stir into it four tablespoonfuls of essence of anchovy and one of lemon juice.
A two-line derivative sauce that assumes you already have a pan of nineteenth-century "butter sauce" on the stove and a bottle of anchovy essence in the store cupboard. Neither assumption holds now, so both need translating.
- What "butter sauce" means hereNot simply melted butter. In books of this period "butter sauce" usually means drawn butter sauce: butter cooked with flour, thinned with hot water or light stock and simmered smooth, then finished with more butter off the heat. Proportions vary from book to book, but something in the order of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of liquid gives the thin white sauce that is the base the anchovy is stirred into.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled commercial condiment — anchovies broken down with salt, vinegar and spice into a pourable brown liquid, sold by Burgess and others. It is thinner and milder than what sits in a modern tube. The closest current stand-ins are Italian colatura di alici or anchovy paste let down with a little water and a splash of vinegar.
- Scale the anchovy downFour tablespoons of modern anchovy paste in a cup of sauce will be aggressively salty. Start with one tablespoon of paste or two of colatura, taste, and build from there. Add no salt until the anchovy is in.
- Do not boil after the anchovy goes inPeriod cookery books routinely warn against boiling a sauce once the anchovy is added; hard simmering can dull or coarsen the flavour and a butter-based sauce may separate. Stir it in off the heat or over the barest warmth, and the same for the lemon juice.
- Lemon"One" means one tablespoonful. Add it last, after tasting for salt, since acid sharpens the perception of saltiness.
- Yield and servingSomething over a cup once the essence and lemon are stirred in, enough for four. Anchovy sauce of this type is at home on poached or grilled white fish.
Bottled anchovy essence was one of the workhorses of the English and American store cupboard from the late eighteenth century onward — a shelf-stable way to get the savoury depth of fermented fish into a sauce without keeping barrelled anchovies to hand. Burgess's is the name most often cited, and cookbooks appear to have treated it as an assumed pantry staple in the way we now assume Worcestershire sauce, which belongs to the same family of anchovy-based condiments. The recipe's brevity is itself period evidence — the compiler expected any reader to know the butter sauce by heart and needed only to say what turned it into something else.