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Gravy, Piquant, for Hash
Mince very finely two shallots and a quarter of a clove of garlic. Put them in a stewpan, with a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Fry very gently, until lightly browned, and keep stirring, to prevent burning. Mix with the gravy, smoothly, two table-spoonfuls of flour, and a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley. Add two table-spoonfuls of vinegar or lemon-juice, a cupful of good stock, and half a slice of bread, toasted until it is firm and hard, but not burnt. Garnish the dish with pickled gherkins. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for half a pint of gravy.
A sharp brown sauce built on shallot, vinegar and toasted bread, meant to lift yesterday's meat. The instructions assume you already have pan drippings or thin gravy to hand, which is the one gap worth filling before you start.
- What "the gravy" meansThe recipe never says where it comes from: it assumes the drippings or thin gravy left from the roast the hash is made of. If you have none, half a pint of well-flavoured brown stock will stand in, though the sauce will be leaner.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Enough to sweat two minced shallots gently without their catching.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons; a table-spoonful here is close enough to the modern 15 ml. Two tablespoons of flour to half a pint of liquid gives a distinctly thick, coating sauce.
- A quarter clove of garlicNot a misprint. Victorian English cookery generally used garlic as a background note, and the shallots carry most of the flavour here.
- The toast is a thickenerHalf a slice, toasted firm and hard and then broken into the pan, softens over the cooking and gives body and a faintly nutty colour. It must be firm and dry rather than scorched; burnt crust turns the whole sauce bitter.
- Add the acid after the flourWork the flour into the fat and liquid smoothly first, then the vinegar or lemon juice. Flour stirred straight into acid lumps and refuses to swell properly.
- Half an hour, and whyHalf an hour -- The recipe gives half an hour as the total time; a gentle simmer cooks out the raw flour and lets the toast break down. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir now and then; at a boil it will catch and taste of scorched flour.
- Yield and finishThe recipe reckons it sufficient for half a pint of gravy. Add the parsley late if you want it green rather than olive, and taste for salt at the end, since reduced stock and gherkins both bring their own.
Sauce piquante belongs to a family of vinegar-sharpened brown sauces often linked, on grounds of family resemblance rather than documented lineage, to the older poivrade, and its English purpose in a book like this was frankly remedial: to make cold roast meat, chopped and reheated, taste like a dish someone had chosen to cook. The toasted bread is the interesting survival. Thickening sauces with dried or fried bread rather than flour is a medieval and early modern technique that flour-based roux largely displaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and here the two sit side by side. The gherkins, the shallot and the shot of vinegar all do the same job of cutting through fat that has already been cooked once. So does the costing: fourpence for half a pint, printed for a household that expected to account for every meal, and for whom a hash was not nostalgia but Tuesday.