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Green Mint Sauce
Take some young freshly-gathered leaves of mint, wash and drain them, and chop them as fine as possible. Mix a dessert-spoonful of pounded sugar with a table-spoonful of chopped mint. Leave it for an hour; then add two tablespoonfuls of good vinegar. Some persons put two parts of mint with one of parsley. If time is a consideration, the vinegar may be added at once, but the flavour will not be so good. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A straightforward uncooked sauce for lamb, and the only variable that matters is the ratio of mint to vinegar. The hour's rest is doing real work.
- The hinge: let the sugar draw the mintSugar mixed with the chopped mint pulls out juice and dissolves in it, so the vinegar goes into an already fragrant syrup rather than simply bleaching raw leaves. The recipe says as much — skip the hour and the flavour suffers.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoon is usually reckoned at about 2 teaspoons, and the tablespoon of the period was broadly comparable to the modern 15 ml, though household spoons varied. So roughly 2 tsp sugar to 1 tbsp chopped mint and 2 tbsp vinegar.
- Quantity of mintA tablespoon of finely chopped mint is the yield of a small handful of picked leaves. Chop with a sharp knife rather than a processor, which bruises the leaves and turns them dark.
- "Good vinegar"Malt vinegar is the traditional choice in an English book of this date and gives the expected sharpness; cider vinegar is milder and rounder. Distilled white vinegar at 5 per cent is harsher than what was meant and may want a little water.
- Sugar"Pounded sugar" is loaf sugar crushed fine — caster sugar is the direct equivalent. Granulated works but takes longer to dissolve in the small amount of liquid the mint releases.
- The parsley variantTwo parts mint to one of parsley softens the sauce. The recipe offers it only as something "some persons" do.
- Yield and keepingAs given it serves three or four alongside a roast. It keeps a day or two refrigerated, but the mint blackens and the fresh top note goes; make it the same day.
Mint sauce with roast lamb is one of the older surviving English uses of a sweet-sour herb condiment, a form with antecedents in the medieval taste for vinegar-and-herb sauces served with meat, and it persisted in Britain after French cookery had moved towards butter- and stock-based sauces. Its survival is often attributed to the pairing with spring lamb, which arrives at the same season as the first tender mint. The costing — twopence, enough for three or four — is typical of the book's habit of pricing every dish for a household keeping accounts, and it shows how nearly free a sauce made from a garden herb was.