Black Butter Sauce for Skate

Ingredients

• a quarter pound of butter
• a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar
• ditto of mushroom ketchup
• ditto of Worcestershire sauce
• pepper to taste
• salt to taste
• and chopped capers

Method

1. 1

   Frizzle butter in a saucepan until light brown, add parsley leaves, vinegar, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, capers, pepper, and salt.

2. 2

   Boil once and serve over skate or in a tureen.

As published

This recipe was extracted from A handbook of fish cookery (1897) by Lucy H. Yates, page 20. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

pepper to taste, a small nob of butter, stir all together over the fire ; when it is of the consistency of cream, put in the bodies of the shrimps to heat through and draw the saucepan to one side until required. Make some good puff paste, line the patty pans, and put a morsel of soft bread in the middle before putting on the cover. Bake the patties to a nice brown, then remove the bread, re- placing it with a spoonful of the mixture, put on the cover, brush over the surface and edges with beaten yolk of egg and water, return the patties to the oven to heat them through again, then send to table on a pretty d'oyley. They are very good also for eating cold. If liked, the top crust may be omitted, and a few bread- crumbs be sprinkled over the top of the mixture. Garnish the dish with curly parsley and a few large shrimps. Shrimp Canapees. — A nice entree. Cut some small rounds from a stale loaf of bread, fry them in oil or lard to a deli- cate brown, then cover each with a layer 64 TESTED RECIPES. of either potted shrimps or shrimp butter. Hard boil two eggs. Remove the yolks, and pound them with a small bit of butter and a pinch of pepper and salt. Cut the whites into thin strips. Lay the strips in a lattice work over the rounds and place a pat of the yellow mixture in the middle of them, and a whole shrimp on that, or the very tiniest sprig of parsley. Make a bed of fresh dry parsley on a dish to lay the rounds upon. Skate. — Skate is an unwholesome fish if eaten out of season. Its best time is during the winter months, and it is posi- tively improved by being kept for a day or two hung up. However it is dressed it should always be skinned first. The liver is a choice morsel. A method of dressing skate which is much liked by French people, is to do it a la Sainte Menehoiild. For this it should be skinned and cut into neat pieces, then simmered in white sauce till tender ; the pieces of fish should then be lifted out on to a shallow dish, the sauce to receive the addition of a yolk of egg and pinch of cayenne pepper, then to be poured over the fish, Parmesan or Cheshire cheese TESTED RECIPES. 65 grated over the top. Set the dish in the oven to get thoroughly hot again. For boihng, large skate are preferable to small ones, and when possible they should be crimped. (N.B. — Crimping can only be done vv^hen the fish is perfectly fresh.) It should be plunged into boiling salt v^ater, then gently simmered till tender. Let it drain well. Boiled skate is very good served with Black Butter sauce. For this last, a quarter pound of butter should be allowed to frizzle in a saucepan until of a light brown colour, then a few washed and dried parsley leaves should be thrown in, a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, ditto of mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and chopped capers, pepper and salt to taste

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.