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Garlic Sauce
Blanch two cloves of garlic in boiling water twice. Dry them, and pound them in a mortar with a salt-spoonful of salt, half a salt-spoonful of pepper, and a piece of butter the size of a small egg. When quite smooth, press the mixture through a coarse sieve, and stir it into half a pint of good melted butter. Add the juice of a lemon. Time, twenty minutes to prepare. There will be sufficient for three-quarters of a pint of sauce. Probable cost, 5d.
A short compound-butter sauce that depends entirely on knowing what a Victorian cook meant by "melted butter" — not butter melted in a pan, but a flour-thickened butter sauce closer to a béchamel made with water.
- "Good melted butter" is a made sauceIn English cookery books of this period melted butter is a flour-thickened butter sauce, not liquefied butter. Proportions vary from book to book, but the pattern is butter and a little flour cooked together and let down with half a pint or so of water or light stock, simmered smooth, often with more butter beaten in at the end. If you simply melt half a pint of butter the garlic purée will not suspend and the sauce will split.
- VolumesHalf a pint here is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups; the finished three-quarters of a pint is roughly 15 fl oz. A salt-spoonful is about ¼ teaspoon, so this is a lightly seasoned sauce.
- Butter the size of a small eggAround 2 oz, 55 g. Weigh it rather than eyeballing — it is the binder that carries the garlic through the sieve.
- Blanching twice is the pointTwo changes of boiling water strip the raw sulphur bite and leave sweetness. Give the cloves two to three minutes in each, drain and dry well; wet garlic will not pound to a paste.
- Mortar or blenderA mortar and a coarse sieve give a silkier result than a food processor at this small volume, but a small blender with the butter and a spoonful of the finished sauce works. Either way, sieve out any fibre before it goes into the hot sauce.
- Heat controlStir the garlic butter into the melted-butter sauce off the direct heat and do not let it boil afterwards. Boiling a butter-rich sauce and then adding lemon juice is the fastest route to a curdled, oily finish.
- Lemon lastAdd the juice at the end, tasting as you go — one lemon in 15 fl oz is assertive, and the acidity also thins the sauce slightly.
- Yield and servingAbout 15 fl oz, enough for six to eight servings. It suits boiled or roast mutton and lamb, grilled white fish, and plainly boiled vegetables.
Cassell's gives this among its sauces, and its construction shows how English kitchens of the late nineteenth century handled garlic: double-blanched, pounded, sieved and folded into a neutral flour-thickened butter sauce, with little left of the raw pungency that British cooks of the period were generally wary of. "Melted butter" in this sense was a workhorse sauce of the English table for well over a century — Hannah Glasse and Eliza Acton both give versions — and it functioned as a base to be flavoured with parsley, capers, anchovy, eggs or, as here, garlic. The costing in pence, a standing feature of Cassell's, was aimed at the housekeeper accounting for every dish; at 5d. this was a cheap dish to make, since garlic and a little butter cost little and the bulk of the sauce is water and flour.