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Game, Sauce Piquante For
Take the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, and mix it smoothly with a table-spoonful of salad-oil, stir in with it a little salt and pepper, a mustard-spoonful of made mustard, a dessert-spoonful of walnut ketchup, and three dessert-spoonfuls of vinegar. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for two small birds.
A cold, uncooked sauce built on a hard-boiled yolk rather than a raw one, closer to a sharp salad dressing than to the cooked sauce piquante of classical French kitchens. Everything depends on getting the yolk smooth before any liquid goes in.
- The hinge: mash the yolk with the oil firstSieve or press the cooked yolk to a fine crumb, then work the oil in a few drops at a time until it is a stiff, glossy paste. Add the vinegar too early and the yolk will stay grainy and the sauce will separate into oily flecks.
- Spoon measuresA tablespoonful here is about 15 ml, a dessert-spoonful about 10 ml, so the sauce is roughly 1 tbsp oil to 2 tbsp vinegar plus 2 tsp ketchup. A "mustard-spoonful" is the small spoon sold with a mustard pot, around half a teaspoon.
- Made mustardThis means mustard already mixed to a paste with liquid, as against dry mustard flour. English mustard from a jar is the direct equivalent; Dijon works but is milder and sweeter.
- Walnut ketchupA thin, dark, salty condiment made from green walnuts, vinegar and spice, once a common British store-cupboard sauce. It is still made by a few specialist producers; mushroom ketchup is the closest substitute, and Worcestershire sauce will carry the same salt-and-vinegar function though with more tamarind and anchovy.
- Salad-oilIn a Victorian British kitchen this normally meant a light, near-flavourless olive oil. A mild olive oil or a neutral oil suits the sauce better than a peppery extra virgin, which fights the mustard.
- The vinegar is dominantTwo parts vinegar to one of oil is very sharp by modern standards, which is the point with rich, gamey birds. Taste before serving and hold back some of the vinegar if the game is mild, or if you are dressing something other than game.
- Yield and servingAs written it makes about 5 tbsp, enough for two small birds such as snipe, woodcock or quail, or roughly four modern portions alongside a larger roast bird. Serve it cold or at room temperature, never heated.
- Probable costThe 4d is pre-decimal British currency, fourpence. A 'probable cost' line appears as a standard part of the entry format alongside the time and the quantity served.
Sauce piquante in the French tradition is a cooked brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallots and chopped gherkin or capers; what Cassell's gives here is the British household version of the idea, an uncooked mustard-and-vinegar dressing owing more to the sauces served cold with cold meats than to any stockpot. The hard-boiled yolk does the work that egg yolk and butter do elsewhere, thickening the mixture and softening the acid without any cooking, a useful trick in a kitchen where a cold sauce might be wanted at short notice for birds coming off the spit. Walnut ketchup dates the recipe as clearly as the fourpence: pickled and pressed green walnuts were a staple British condiment from the eighteenth century onward, valued for adding depth to a sauce long before commercial tomato ketchup displaced them. The mention of "two small birds" also reflects how game reached Victorian tables, in ones and twos from a shoot or a poulterer rather than in uniform supermarket packs.