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Epicurean Sauce
This is a good sauce for fish, added to melted butter or any kind of gravy, and is made by mixing with half a pint of walnut ketchup an equal quantity of chilli vinegar, and adding a pint and a half of mushroom ketchup and three table-spoonfuls of Indian soy. Shake the ingredients well together, and bottle for use. Probable cost, 2s.
A store sauce rather than a dish: four bottled condiments shaken together and decanted. The work is entirely in sourcing the components, three of which have largely left British shops.
- The measures are imperialAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups) and a pint and a half is 30 fl oz (about 3½ US cups). With the soy the finished quantity is a little over 50 fl oz, roughly 1.5 litres, which is a lot of sauce for a modern household; scaling to a quarter gives a single bottle.
- Indian soy is soy sauceThe 'soy' of nineteenth-century British kitchens was an imported dark soy, generally thicker and saltier than a modern Japanese shoyu. A Chinese dark soy, or a light soy with a little molasses, is likely to be closer than a delicate shoyu.
- Mushroom ketchupStill made commercially in Britain and easy to make at home from salted, pressed field mushrooms. It is thin, black and intensely savoury, nothing like tomato ketchup, and it carries most of the flavour here.
- Walnut ketchupMade from green walnuts salted and pressed, this is now a specialist item. Some British firms still bottle it; without it the sauce loses its bitter, tannic edge, and a mushroom-heavy version will taste flatter.
- Chilli vinegarSimply vinegar steeped with dried chillies for a week or two and strained. Commercial chilli vinegars vary wildly in heat, so taste before committing the full 10 fl oz.
- Shake, and keep shakingNothing is cooked, so the ingredients will separate on standing. Shake the bottle each time before pouring, and again after a day or two of settling when you first make it.
- KeepingSalt and vinegar do the preserving, and the mixture keeps for months in a tightly corked bottle in a cool, dark cupboard. Refrigerate once opened if your kitchen is warm.
- How to use itA teaspoon or two stirred into melted butter or a fish gravy at the end, off the heat. Boiling it hard drives off the vinegar aromatics and leaves only salt.
- The cost note"2s" is two shillings, the estimated price of making the whole batch, a figure Cassell's gives throughout as a guide to household budgeting.
Before tomato ketchup took the name for itself, a "ketchup" was any thin, dark, salted extract used to deepen sauces, and mushroom and walnut were the two English standards. Compounded store sauces like this one were a fixture of Victorian kitchens: a cook mixed a large bottle once, kept it on the shelf, and used a spoonful to lift plain melted butter into something worth serving. The inclusion of Indian soy shows how far the East India trade had reached into ordinary British cookery by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the 1870s; soy had been imported and sold in London since the eighteenth century and was treated simply as another bottled flavouring. The name "epicurean" was a common Victorian label for any rich, complex compound sauce rather than a reference to a specific recipe.