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Cold Meat Sauce
A good sauce for cold meat is made by beating the yolks of three eggs, and adding a wineglassful of jelly cut up. The seasoning is made with a tablespoonful each of flour and mustard, softened with vinegar. Put the whole in a sauce-pan with a tablespoonful of butter and half a teacupful of vinegar. Boil, stirring constantly until thick. Any solid pickle, like cucumber, may be chopped fine, and stirred thoroughly in when the sauce is cold.
A boiled egg-and-mustard dressing in the family of English salad creams, meant to be spooned over cold roast beef, ham or tongue. The measurements are casual and the word "boil" is misleading.
- Do not actually boil itGo gently with the heat -- the recipe says to boil, and the tablespoonful of flour does give the yolks some protection, but with three yolks in this little liquid a hard boil risks a grainy, curdled sauce. Low heat or a bain-marie, stirring constantly, until it coats the back of a spoon (around 170-180F) is the safer route.
- WineglassfulIn turn-of-the-century American books a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. "Jelly cut up" means a firm fruit jelly -- currant is the usual candidate for cold meats, though the recipe does not say -- cut into cubes so it melts evenly.
- TeacupfulA teacup is smaller than a modern mug; period tables put it variously between about 4 and 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful is somewhere around a quarter to a third of a cup of vinegar. With the flour and eggs this gives a thick, sharp sauce.
- MustardA tablespoonful of mustard here means dry English mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar; the instruction to soften it with vinegar confirms this. Slaking the flour and mustard together with a little vinegar first, as directed, prevents lumps.
- Order of workMix flour and mustard to a smooth paste with a spoonful of the vinegar, whisk in the yolks, then add the remaining vinegar, butter and jelly off the heat before warming the pan. Adding hot liquid to unmixed yolks is the usual route to curdling.
- The pickle goes in coldChopped cucumber pickle stirred into hot sauce will weep and thin it. Cool the sauce fully first, as the original says, and drain the pickle well.
- Yield and keepingAbout a cup, enough for six to eight servings of cold meat. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; the acidity helps but this is a fresh egg sauce, not a preserve.
Sauces like this one sit between the old boiled salad dressings of English cookery and the bottled salad creams that later stood in for them. A cook wanting a creamy, tart dressing that would hold together cooked the yolks with vinegar and a little flour, which both thickened the mixture and helped keep it from separating. The sweet note from jelly is characteristic: currant jelly was a common accompaniment to cold roast meats and game in the nineteenth century, and folding it into the sauce combined the two courses of the sideboard into one. Cold meat itself was a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian table, since a large Sunday roast was expected to reappear through the week, and books of this period devote whole sections to sauces, relishes and "made dishes" for the later appearances of the joint.