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Christopher North's Sauce for Meat or Gravy
Put a dessert-spoonful of sifted loaf-sugar, a salt-spoonful of salt, and a heaped salt-spoonful of cayenne pepper into a jar. Mix them thoroughly, then add to them very gradually two table-spoonfuls of Harvey's sauce, a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a table-spoonful of fresh lemon-juice strained, and a glass of port. Place the jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and let it remain until quite hot, but do not let it boil. If bottled when it is made, it will keep good for several days. It may be used for ducks, geese, pork, or any broil. If the flavour of cayenne is liked, the quantities may be doubled. The sauce should be made the night before it is used. Time to heat, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d., for this quantity. Sufficient for a quarter of a pint of sauce.
A Victorian store sauce built on two bottled condiments, one of which no longer exists. The whole thing is assembled cold and warmed through, never cooked, so the measurements and the heating are what matter.
- The hinge: heat, do not boilThe jar sits in a water bath so the port and lemon juice warm gently rather than being boiled; the recipe asks only that it be "quite hot" after about a quarter of an hour.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy sauce, sharpened with vinegar, shallot and cayenne, sold in Britain from the late eighteenth century and long since off the shelves. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest living relative and is used at the same quantity; it is thinner and sweeter, so taste before adding more sugar.
- Mushroom ketchupNot a tomato product. It is salted mushrooms pressed and strained to a thin, black, intensely savoury liquid, still made commercially in Britain and easy enough to find. Soy sauce is a poor stand-in but will do for depth if nothing else is at hand.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones and scraped or crushed as needed. Sifting it produced a fine powder that dissolved in cold liquid; ordinary caster sugar does the same job.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons, a tablespoonful about 3 teaspoons, and a salt-spoonful about a quarter-teaspoon. The cayenne is therefore a generous quarter-teaspoon in a quarter-pint of sauce, which is already assertive.
- A glass of portAmbiguous in the original. A Victorian wine glass was usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, and roughly that quantity suits the stated quarter-pint yield. Start with 2 fl oz.
- Yield and keepingA quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. The book's "several days" assumes a cold larder; keep it bottled in the refrigerator and use it within a week.
- ServingSpooned warm over roast duck, goose or pork, or over grilled chops and steaks. Made the night before, as directed, the cayenne and the port settle into each other rather than sitting apart.
Christopher North was the pen name of John Wilson (1785-1854), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh and the presiding voice of the Noctes Ambrosianae, the long-running convivial dialogues in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Those pieces made a literary set-piece of Scottish eating and drinking, and a sauce for game and roast meats attached itself to his name in the cookery books that followed; the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and versions differ in whether the port or the cayenne dominates. Its structure is thoroughly of its period: a domestic sauce assembled almost entirely from bought bottled condiments, which by the 1870s were cheap, ubiquitous and the backbone of the English store cupboard. Cassell's costing of sixpence, and its careful note that the sauce keeps only a few days, both point to a household making small quantities to order rather than laying anything down.