Gherkin Sauce
Cut six green gherkins into very thin slices; place them in a small stewpan with a little Tarragon vinegar and pepper. Let these simmer briskly for a few minutes on the fire, then add a small quantity of white sauce and a bit of veal. Stir the sauce until it boils, then set aside until it clears itself. Skim and pour it into a dish for use.
A short compound sauce of the classic French repertoire, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities beyond the six gherkins, and a good deal assumed about what is already on the stove. It is essentially a velouté sharpened with vinegar and pickle, meant for boiled or braised meats.
- What "a bit of veal" meansProbably not a chunk of raw meat. In this style of writing it most likely means a piece of meat glaze (glace de viande) or a spoonful of strong veal gravy, added for body and savour, though a small piece of veal simmered in the sauce cannot be ruled out. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace or a tablespoon of well-reduced veal or chicken stock does the same job.
- White sauceIn period books this may be a flour-and-butter sauce moistened with white stock (velouté) or a milk béchamel; both were in use. The recipe asks only for "a small quantity," so add enough to coat the gherkins rather than a full cupful.
- Gherkins"Green gherkins" here are most likely the small pickled cucumbers, cornichons, rather than fresh ones. Slice them thin and do not rinse; the brine is part of the point.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping a bruised sprig in white wine vinegar for a week. A tablespoon or two is enough — the sauce should be sharp, not sour, and the vinegar reduces slightly during the first simmer.
- "Until it clears itself"The pan is drawn off the fire and the sauce left to stand so that fat and scum rise, then lifted off with a spoon before serving. (Drawing a pan half off the heat so the sauce boils on one side only, with the scum collecting on the still side, is a related French sauce-kitchen practice, but it is not what is written here.) Allow the sauce a few minutes to settle before skimming.
- Simmer timesThe gherkins need only two or three minutes in the vinegar — long cooking turns them soft and dulls the sharpness. Once the white sauce is added the sauce is simply stirred up to the boil, then set aside to settle and skim.
- Yield and servingQuantities are not given, so the yield depends on how much white sauce is used. Sauces of this kind went with boiled and braised meats — boiled beef, calf's head, tongue, poached poultry — and share the vinegar-and-gherkin sharpness of sauce piquante. Season with salt only at the end, after the stock and pickle have reduced.
Sharp pickle sauces for boiled and reheated meats are old and thoroughly practical: vinegar and cucumber cut the fat of a braise and mask the flatness of meat cooked the day before. The gherkin itself takes its name from a Dutch diminutive of a word for cucumber, and small ridge cucumbers grown for pickling were a long-established kitchen-garden crop in northern Europe. The method here — simmer the aromatic, add a made white sauce, then let the finished sauce clear and skim it — belongs to the French professional tradition of sauce-making that Carême helped codify and that passed into English household books through the nineteenth century. Its appearance in a domestic manual, with the quantities left vague and "a bit of veal" assumed to be sitting in the larder, shows how far restaurant technique had filtered into the household kitchen, and how much such books still expected the cook already to know.