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MINT SAUCE (another way)
Spear-mint (the true species, both for this and to boil with green peas) is a plant which becomes a weed in any but the driest and sandiest soils. In ordinary garden-ground, it soon shows its encroaching disposition. It may be obtained early, by covering it with a bell-glass; by putting a tuft into a frame or hot-bed; or by growing it indoors, in a pot, or mignonette-box. Wash the sprigs of mint, to clear them from dust or rain-splashings; let them dry on a napkin; strip off the leaves, and chop them fine on a chopping-board. Fill your sauce-boat one-quarter full of chopped mint; pour over the mint vinegar equal to half the contents of the vessel. Drop in a few lumps of sugar, and let it stand at least an hour before serving, to extract the flavour of the herb. Before sending it to table, stir up all together. Mint sauce will keep for a time, bottled, and be just as good as, if not better than, it was the first day.
MINT SAUCE (another way). (See LAMB, SAUCE FOR.)
The proportions here are given by eye, as fractions of the sauce-boat rather than in spoons, but they scale cleanly: one part chopped mint to two parts vinegar, sweetened to taste.
- Working proportionsSauce-boat sizes vary; if yours holds about a cup, a quarter full of packed chopped mint is roughly 4 tablespoons, with about half a cup of vinegar over it. The 'few lumps' of sugar, in the old sense, would come to something like a scant tablespoon.
- The vinegar matters mostThe recipe does not specify a vinegar; a household malt vinegar is the likely assumption, milder in flavour than modern distilled white. Use malt or cider vinegar, and if the sauce tastes raw and hot rather than sharp, slacken it with a spoonful or two of hot water, which also helps the sugar dissolve.
- Spearmint, not any mintThe insistence on the true species is not fussiness. Peppermint carries far more menthol and turns the sauce medicinal against lamb; garden spearmint (Mentha spicata) is what is wanted, and Moroccan or Nana mint does the same job.
- Dry the leaves properlyWashed mint left damp waters the sauce and makes the chopped leaf bruise into a paste on the board. Spin or pat it thoroughly dry before stripping the leaves.
- Chop, do not blendA food processor tears and bruises the leaves and dulls the colour. A sharp knife and a few decisive passes keeps the colour green and the pieces distinct.
- The standing hourThis is the step people skip. An hour at room temperature lets the vinegar draw the oils out of the leaf; served straight away the sauce tastes of vinegar with green flecks in it.
- Bell-glasses and hot-bedsThe forcing methods described are Victorian kitchen-garden practice for early mint. A pot on a windowsill does the same thing, and supermarket bunches make the point moot.
- KeepingBottled and refrigerated it holds a week or two, though the leaves darken to olive. The flavour does deepen, as the text claims; the looks do not.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup, enough for four to six servings alongside roast lamb.
Mint with lamb is old English practice, generally traced to the medieval and Tudor habit of serving sharp, sweetened herb sauces with roast meats, of which verjuice and vinegar sauces were the common base long before mint became the fixed partner for lamb. Cassell's, following its usual indexing practice, simply cross-refers readers to LAMB, SAUCE FOR without further comment. What is striking about this entry is how much of it is gardening rather than cooking: the writer expects a household to grow its own spearmint, to know that it runs riot in damp ground, and to force it early under a bell-glass for the first spring lamb. That assumption of a kitchen garden sits behind a great many nineteenth-century herb recipes, and it explains the warning about washing off rain-splashings, a concern of someone cutting mint from a bed rather than opening a packet.