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Ham Sauce for Grills and Broils
Put two ounces of lean ham, already cooked, cut into small dice, into a saucepan with an ounce of butter and a tea-spoonful of finely-minced shallots. Fry them for two or three minutes, then add half a pint of good brown sauce, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a little cayenne. Stir these over the fire for six or eight minutes, and, just before serving, add a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Suitable for grills and broils. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for half a pint of sauce.
A quick derivative sauce built on brown sauce, meant to be spooned over grilled chops, steaks or kidneys. Almost all of the work is in the brown sauce you start with.
- Brown sauce means espagnoleIn Cassell's, "good brown sauce" is most likely a made brown sauce of the espagnole type — browned mirepoix and flour cooked into a rich stock and reduced — not the bottled condiment sold under that name in Britain today. A well-reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly with a brown roux gives much the same result; half a pint here is 10 imperial fl oz, about 284 ml.
- Half a pintThe book is British, so a pint is 20 fl oz and the yield is about 1¼ US cups; the recipe itself says only that it is sufficient for half a pint of sauce.
- Don't let the lemon juice cookThe recipe adds the acid "just before serving," so it should barely warm through; long cooking dulls the sharpness that cuts the fat of a grill.
- The hamTwo ounces is about 55 g of cooked lean ham, cut in a fine dice — the point is texture and salt, not chunks. A dry-cured ham gives more flavour than a wet-cured supermarket one; taste before adding any salt, since between the ham and a reduced brown sauce the sauce is likely salted already.
- ShallotsShallot -- A teaspoonful minced is a fraction of a small shallot. Two or three minutes in butter is enough to soften it; heavily browned shallot turns bitter against the ham.
- Simmer, not boilSix to eight minutes of stirring over moderate heat is meant to marry the flavours and reduce slightly. A hard boil will break the butter out of the sauce and dull the parsley.
- Cayenne"A little" here means a pinch. Start with an eighth of a teaspoon.
- CostSixpence covers the ham and butter; the brown sauce is assumed to be already made in the kitchen.
Cassell's belongs to the era when English cookery had absorbed the French system of mother sauces and small sauces, and this is a textbook small sauce: espagnole plus a garnish, an aromatic and an acid finish. It sits close to what French kitchens called a sauce piquante or, with ham, a variant of Zingara — which traditionally carries ham or tongue in julienne. The household logic matters as much as the pedigree: a Victorian kitchen would likely have kept a stockpot and a batch of brown sauce going, and scraps of cooked ham were presumably a standing byproduct of the cold larder, so a cook could produce this in ten minutes from things already on hand. "Grills and broils" meant chops, steaks, kidneys and bones devilled over the fire — plain, fast cooking that needed a sauce to dress it up.