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Sauce Elegante
Make a "drawn-butter sauce" and add to it one teaspoonful of mustard, one tablespoonful of good catsup, one-fourth teacup of vinegar, one-fourth teacup of port wine, a bunch of parsley chopped fine, two pickled cucumbers chopped fine. After mixing ingredients, boil and pour it hot over the meat. This is excellent with stewed meats.
A compound sauce built on a base the book assumes you already know. Everything hinges on getting that base right and then not overcooking what you add to it.
- Drawn-butter sauceThe period base is a light flour-thickened butter sauce, not clarified butter: roughly 2 tbsp butter cooked with 1 tbsp flour, whisked with about a cup of hot water or light stock and simmered until smooth. American books of this era use "drawn butter" for this white sauce; British ones sometimes mean melted butter alone, which will not carry the additions here.
- TeacupPeriod equivalences for a teacup vary, commonly reckoned somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a standard cup; taking the larger figure, a fourth of one is roughly 3 tablespoons each of vinegar and port. Add the vinegar cautiously and taste, since modern distilled vinegar is sharper than much of what was sold in bulk then.
- CatsupNot necessarily tomato. Mushroom and walnut catsups were still in use in some households at this period, and both are thin, dark and salty rather than sweet. Tomato ketchup will work but brings more sugar; a spoonful of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire may be closer to the intent.
- MustardA teaspoonful means dry English mustard powder unless you have reason to think otherwise. If you substitute prepared mustard, use two teaspoons and cut the vinegar accordingly.
- Pickled cucumbersSour gherkins or cornichons, chopped fine — not sweet gherkins or bread-and-butter slices, which will turn the sauce cloying against the port.
- The boilBring it just to a boil to marry the additions and take the raw edge off the vinegar, then serve. A hard or prolonged boil will break the butter out of the sauce and cook the parsley grey; if you can, stir the parsley in during the last thirty seconds.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings. It is designed for braised or stewed beef and mutton, where the acid and pickle cut through long-cooked fat; it is heavy on plain fish or poultry.
The name is doing some work here: "elegante" gives a French cast to what is essentially an English tavern sauce, though how deliberate that dressing-up was is not something the text itself settles. The combination of port, vinegar, mustard and chopped pickle belongs to the same family as Reform sauce and Cumberland sauce, both nineteenth-century British creations, and the intent is much the same — a sharp, sweet-sour foil for stewed beef or mutton that had spent hours losing its character. That it is built on drawn butter rather than a reduced brown stock marks it as a domestic recipe rather than a professional one: drawn butter was the household cook's all-purpose base, quick to make from pantry staples and endlessly variable by what you stirred into it.