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Indian Pickle Sauce
Fry an onion in butter until brown, remove it from the stewpan, and stir in a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder, and a table-spoonful of pickle vinegar Strain and add the sauce to a quarter of a pint of rich melted butter. Cut pickles into dice, and serve them in the sauce.
A short store-cupboard sauce built on the Victorian idea of "melted butter," which is not what the phrase suggests. Read that point first.
- "Rich melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn English cookery books of this period melted butter means a thickened white sauce: flour cooked in butter, let down with water or stock, with more butter beaten in at the end. A "rich" one is heavier on the butter. Pouring plain liquid butter over the curry mixture will give you a broken, greasy result.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. Enough sauce for four modest servings alongside boiled or cold meat, fish, or rice.
- Dessert-spoonful and table-spoonfulA dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons; period spoon measures were not standardised and could run larger than modern ones, so treat the tablespoon as a generous one. Both amounts are seasoning quantities and can be adjusted to the curry powder you have.
- Pickle vinegarThe spiced liquor from a jar of mixed English pickles or piccalilli. Malt vinegar with a pinch of mustard powder and turmeric is the nearest substitute; plain white wine vinegar will taste thin here.
- Cook the curry powderCommercial curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty if it is only warmed through. Stir it into the hot buttery pan for half a minute or so, until it smells toasted, before the vinegar goes in.
- The onion and the strainingThe onion is a flavouring only, discarded once browned. Straining removes the spice grit, so the finished sauce is smooth and the diced pickles are the only texture in it.
- Which pickles"Indian pickle" in Victorian usage meant mixed vegetable pickle in a mustard-and-turmeric brine, closest today to piccalilli or a jar of English mixed pickles. Dice them small and add off the heat so they stay crisp.
The sauce belongs to the long English domestication of Indian flavours, in which curry powder, mango chutney and "Indian pickle" arrived in the kitchen largely as bottled condiments rather than as techniques. By the later nineteenth century curry powder was an ordinary grocer's item and cooks used it much as they used anchovy essence or mushroom ketchup: a spoonful stirred into the standard sauce base to give a familiar dish a different character. That base, the flour-thickened "melted butter," was the workhorse of English sauce-making and the ancestor of a dozen variations listed in books of this kind, distinguished only by what was stirred into it. The instruction to serve the diced pickles in the sauce rather than beside it is what marks this one out, and it suits cold meat and leftovers, the usual duty of a sharp sauce in a Victorian household.