Home › The Principles of Cookery › Hot Sauce, for Broils, Etc
Hot Sauce, for Broils, Etc
Melt two ounces of butter in a stewpan, stir in with it a table-spoonful of flour, and mix smoothly with the back of a wooden spoon until it is lightly browned. Add gradually to it a quarter of a pint of good stock, stirring all the time; add also a tea-spoonful of chopped capers, a tea-spoonful of chopped shallots, a tea-spoonful of mustard, half a tea-spoonful of essence of anchovy, a table-spoonful of walnut ketchup, a table-spoonful of port, or claret, and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of cayenne. Boil gently for six or seven minutes, and serve as hot as possible. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A brown-roux sauce built on stock and sharp condiments, meant to be spooned over grilled chops, steaks or kidneys. It comes together in under fifteen minutes, and the only real skill is in the roux.
- Brown the roux, don't burn itTwo ounces of butter to one tablespoon of flour is a very loose roux by modern proportions, deliberately so — it stays glossy rather than pasty. Keep it over moderate heat and stir constantly until it smells nutty and turns the colour of weak tea; past that point it goes bitter and loses thickening power.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or two-thirds of a cup. Add it a little at a time off the boil so the flour disperses without lumps.
- Good stockThe original says only 'good stock', which in a household of this kind would have meant whatever meat stock the stockpot held. Use a well-reduced unsalted beef or brown chicken stock; a salty commercial cube will collide with the anchovy, capers and ketchup, all of which bring their own salt.
- Essence of anchovyA Victorian bottled anchovy extract. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste from a tube is the closest match; two mashed salted anchovy fillets or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce will also do.
- Walnut ketchupNot tomato ketchup — a thin, dark, spiced liquor made from green walnuts, sharp and slightly bitter. It is still sold in Britain; mushroom ketchup is the usual substitute, and a mix of soy sauce with a dash of balsamic approximates the flavour if neither is at hand.
- Cayenne quantityA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in 150 ml of sauce is genuinely hot, which is the point of a "hot sauce for broils." Add half at first and taste after the sauce has simmered, since the heat blooms as it cooks.
- The six or seven minutesThis is not just heating through. The gentle simmer cooks out the raw flour and lets the shallot soften and the mustard lose its rawness. Do not skip it, and do not boil hard or the butter will separate.
- ServingSufficient for five or six means a spoonful or two each alongside grilled meat, not a pourable gravy. Keep it warm over hot water rather than on direct heat, and whisk before it goes to the table.
Cassell's places this among the compound sauces of the classic English kitchen, where a browned roux was the standard vehicle for whatever bottled sharpness the store cupboard held. Capers, shallots, mustard, anchovy, walnut ketchup and a glass of port are characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century sauce shelf, and overlapping ingredient lists turn up in the commercial bottled sauces of the era, Worcestershire among them. "Broils" meant meat cooked over or under direct fire — chops, steaks, kidneys, devilled bones — and food cooked that way arrives dry, so a hot, salty, acidic sauce was less a garnish than a corrective. The "probable cost, 4d." is a Cassell's habit: the book costed its recipes for households keeping an eye on the budget.