Mint Sauce
1 bunch of mint finely chopped. 2 tablespoons cold water. 1/3 cup vinegar. 2 tablespoons powdered sugar.
PROCESS: Dilute vinegar with cold water, add sugar and stir until sugar is dissolved, pour over mint (there should be four tablespoons of mint), place on back of range and infuse for one-half hour.
A classic English-style mint sauce for roast lamb, thinner and sharper than the jarred product. Two things need attention: the vinegar, and the very gentle heat the original calls for.
- "Back of range"On a coal or wood range, the back was the coolest zone — warm enough to steep, never near a simmer. Use the lowest burner setting, or set the bowl over a pan of hot water off the heat. Boiling drives off the volatile oils and turns the mint drab and hay-flavoured.
- The vinegar quantity1½ cup of vinegar to 4 tablespoons of mint gives a very loose, pourable sauce; some contemporary versions use half that. The figure may be a misprint for ½ cup. Start with less and dilute to taste rather than committing the full amount.
- Which vinegarThe recipe doesn't specify. Cider vinegar was the common household vinegar in American kitchens, malt vinegar in English ones. Distilled white vinegar is harsher and flattens the mint; white wine vinegar works well.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and dissolves just as readily.
- Chopping the mintThe recipe equates its 'bunch' with four tablespoons of chopped leaves; a modern supermarket bunch, stemmed, may give more than that, so measure rather than assume. Chop with a sharp knife rather than a processor — bruised mint blackens in acid.
- Serving and yieldAs written this makes a little over 1½ cups, enough for a leg of lamb with plenty over. Serve at room temperature in a small pitcher or boat; it is meant to be spooned over the meat, not brushed on before roasting.
- KeepingThe acidity keeps it a week or so refrigerated, but the colour and perfume fade after a day. Make it the morning of the dinner.
Mint sauce belongs to the English roast-lamb tradition, and by the time this book appeared in the early twentieth century the pairing was fixed enough that American cookbooks carried it as a matter of course — a vinegar-and-sugar infusion rather than the thick jelly many cooks now expect. The combination of sharp acid with fatty roast meat is old kitchen logic, the same reasoning behind apple sauce with pork; mint is among the herbs that return most aggressively in early summer, which suits a book organised by season. That seasonal placement is the point of a book like 52 Sunday Dinners: the menu for a given week was built from what the market and the garden were actually offering.