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Fowl, Sauce For
Boil two eggs for ten minutes and pound the yolks with a shallot, an anchovy, and a teaspoonful of mustard; moisten with two dessert-spoonfuls of vinegar. Rub the mixture to a smooth paste, and add by degrees more oil and vinegar, about a table-spoonful of each. Strain, and send to table in a tureen. Probable cost, 4d.
A cold, pounded egg-and-anchovy sauce for boiled or cold fowl — essentially a Victorian ancestor of the thick mustard vinaigrettes served with poultry. It comes together in a mortar in ten minutes.
- The oil problemThe recipe says to add "more oil and vinegar" but never gives an initial quantity of oil — only the two dessert-spoonfuls of vinegar. Read it as beginning with a tablespoon or so of oil worked into the yolk paste, then a further tablespoon of each; the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, i.e. midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Two dessert-spoonfuls of vinegar is about 4 teaspoons.
- Pound, don't whiskThe texture depends on the yolks being reduced to a genuinely smooth paste with the shallot and anchovy before any liquid goes in. A mortar or a small food processor does this; a bowl and fork leaves it grainy and the sauce will not hold together.
- The anchovyOne salted or oil-packed anchovy, not a whole tin; a period "anchovy" usually meant the whole small fish, i.e. two fillets. Anchovy paste can be substituted but is harder to judge for salt. Taste before adding any salt of your own -- the anchovy and mustard between them usually suffice.
- MustardThe recipe does not say whether powder or prepared mustard is meant; English mustard powder is the likelier reading, being sharper and drier than a jar mustard, and it suits a paste moistened with vinegar. Dijon works, but use a little more and expect a milder result.
- Boiling the eggsTen minutes gives firm, fully set yolks, which is what you want for pounding. The whites are not used in the sauce — chop them into a salad rather than discarding them.
- StrainingPush the finished sauce through a fine sieve to catch shallot fibre and anchovy bone. Do this at the end, as directed, not before the oil goes in.
- YieldRoughly half a cup on the stated quantities. It stiffens on standing in the refrigerator; loosen with a few drops of vinegar before serving.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the sauce tureen, when a cold boiled or roast fowl was expected to arrive at table with something sharp beside it, and pounded hard-boiled yolk was one common way of giving such a sauce body. Sauces of this family -- yolk, anchovy, mustard, shallot, oil and vinegar worked to a paste in a mortar -- appear in English cookery under a range of names, including Cambridge sauce and various "sauces for cold fowl", and they sit close to the French sauce remoulade, which uses much the same reasoning with capers and herbs added. The "probable cost, 4d." is characteristic of the book: Cassell's priced most of its recipes so a household manager could judge them against the week's budget, and fourpence marks this as a thoroughly economical accompaniment.