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Hashes, Sauce For
The following store sauce will be found useful to improve the flavour of gravies for hashes and rechauffes. Put four chopped anchovies, an eighth of a pint of vinegar, two blades of mace, a bay-leaf, two pounded cloves, a minced onion, a dozen peppercorns, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a tea-spoonful of scraped horse-radish, into a saucepan, and simmer gently until the anchovies are dissolved. Add half a pint of claret, simmer ten minutes longer, strain and bottle for use. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the wine.
A Victorian store sauce, meant to live in a bottle and be spooned into gravies by the teaspoon. It is essentially a homemade anchovy-and-claret essence in the family of Worcestershire and the old mushroom ketchups.
- The hinge: dissolve, don't reduceThe anchovies must break down completely into the vinegar over the lowest heat. The book sets no time for this stage, only "until the anchovies are dissolved," with ten minutes after the claret and half an hour in all. A hard boil will drive off the vinegar and leave you with salty fragments rather than a smooth essence.
- Imperial measuresAn eighth of an Imperial pint is 2 1/2 fl oz, about 5 tablespoons; half a pint of claret is 10 fl oz, a little over a US cup. Strained, the yield should be on the order of a cup, depending on how hard it simmers.
- AnchoviesThe book means salt-cured anchovies, far stronger and firmer than modern fillets in oil. Four salted fish are closer to 8-10 tinned fillets, or about 2 teaspoons of anchovy paste.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg; a "blade" is one dried piece. Two blades are approximately 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace, though ground mace will cloud the sauce and cannot be strained out cleanly.
- ClaretNineteenth-century claret was a dry red Bordeaux, lighter and more acidic than most modern reds. Any dry, unoaked red works; avoid anything jammy or high in alcohol, which will taste sweet against the anchovy and vinegar.
- Horse-radish"Scraped" means grated from the fresh root. Jarred creamed horseradish contains cream, sugar and stabilisers and is not a substitute here; plain grated horseradish in vinegar is.
- Savoury herbsA Victorian bunch of savoury herbs usually meant parsley and thyme, sometimes with a little marjoram or savory, tied so it can be lifted out. The bay leaf is already listed separately.
- StorageDespite the instruction to "bottle for use," this sauce is not acidic enough overall to keep unrefrigerated. Bottle it, keep it cold, and use it within two weeks; the salt and vinegar do the work of preservation only in the cold.
- How much to useA teaspoon or two per cup of gravy is plenty. It is a seasoning at the strength of fish sauce, not a sauce to serve on its own.
This entry belongs to the Victorian genre of "store sauces" -- concentrated bottled flavourings kept on the kitchen shelf to be added by the spoonful, the domestic ancestors of the commercial bottles that were displacing them as Cassell's went through its editions. Anchovy essence, mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup and Harvey's sauce all worked on the same principle: salt fish or fermented vegetable matter, spice, vinegar and often wine, reduced to something that could stand in for long-simmered stock. The stated purpose here is to improve the gravies of hashes and r cipes -- more precisely, of hashes and réchauffés. A réchauffé is a reheated dish, and hashes made from yesterday's roast were the backbone of the middle-class weekday table; the meat was already cooked, so the interest had to come from the gravy. The costing -- fourpence, wine excluded -- is a reminder that the wine was the expensive part and that Cassell's expected readers who owned a bottle of claret but still counted pence on the anchovies.