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Lobster, Sauce Piquant For
Mix a salt-spoonful of raw mustard and a small pinch of salt and pepper smoothly with a dessert-spoonful of cold water; add gradually a quarter of a pint of best vinegar. Stir gently over the fire until the vinegar is hot, then put in two ounces of fresh butter, and serve. Time, ten minutes. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A sharp butter-and-vinegar sauce of the plainest Victorian type, meant to cut the richness of boiled or grilled lobster. It stands or falls on temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe butter is what gives this sauce body, and it holds only as a loose emulsion in hot vinegar. Take the pan off direct heat before the butter goes in and swirl it in a piece at a time; a boil will split it into oil and sour liquid.
- Saltspoon and dessert-spoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, a dessert-spoon about two teaspoons. So: 1/4 tsp mustard powder slaked with 2 tsp cold water.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz (about 4.8 US fl oz, a little under two-thirds of a US cup). That is a great deal of vinegar for 2 oz of butter, and the result is meant to be bracing rather than creamy.
- "Raw mustard"This means dry mustard powder, not made mustard from a jar. Slaking it in cold water first and letting it stand a few minutes lets the heat develop; hot liquid poured straight onto the powder kills the pungency.
- "Best vinegar"In an English kitchen of the period this would likely have meant a good malt vinegar, or sometimes a wine vinegar. Modern distilled vinegar is plainer and sharper in flavour; white wine or cider vinegar suits the sauce better.
- ButterVictorian "fresh butter" is unsalted. Use unsalted and cold, cut into small cubes, so it emulsifies as it melts rather than pooling.
- Yield and servingEnough for four or five as a dressing for lobster, poured over or handed separately in a warmed boat. Serve at once; it will not hold or reheat without separating.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English sauce dictionary, when a household book was expected to supply a named dressing for every fish on the slab. "Sauce piquante" was borrowed from French practice, where it denoted a reduction sharpened with vinegar and usually gherkins or shallot; the English version here is a plainer thing of vinegar, mustard and butter. The 4d costing is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every entry. Lobster itself was not the luxury it later became: it was landed in quantity around the British coast through the nineteenth century, sold boiled from barrows in London, and treated in these books as an everyday supper dish that needed sharpening rather than gilding.