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NASTURTIUM SEED SAUCE (for Boiled Mutton, etc.)
Take two table-spoonfuls of nasturtium seeds, preserved as in the last recipe, cut them into small pieces, and put them aside until wanted. Dissolve one ounce of fresh butter in a stewpan, dredge three-quarters of an ounce of flour slowly into it, and make it quite smooth with the back of a wooden spoon. Add half a pint of boiling gravy, and beat it until quite free from lumps. Season with a dessert-spoonful of nasturtium vinegar, a pinch of cayenne, and a little salt if required. Put in the bruised nasturtium seeds, boil up once more, and serve. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A plain butter-and-flour sauce built on mutton gravy, sharpened with pickled nasturtium seeds in place of capers. The whole thing depends on having the pickle already made, which the book assumes from the preceding entry.
- The seeds are the pointThese are green nasturtium seedpods pickled in salt and vinegar — the classic English caper substitute, sometimes called "poor man's capers." Drained brined nonpareil capers, chopped, stand in almost exactly; use about two tablespoons and go a little easy on added salt.
- Nasturtium vinegarAn infusion of nasturtium flowers or pods in white wine vinegar, left several weeks. Plain white wine vinegar works, or the vinegar from the caper jar, which brings the same acid and salt.
- Weights into spoonsOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; three-quarters of an ounce of flour is roughly 3 tablespoons — slightly less flour than butter by weight.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fluid ounces, about 1¼ US cups. Using a US half-pint of 8 ounces will give a noticeably stiffer sauce.
- "Boiling gravy"Not thickened pan gravy but hot brown stock or the strained cooking liquor from the mutton. Adding it boiling to the roux is the whole trick for a lump-free sauce; add it in stages and beat between each.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons in Victorian measure, halfway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Add it at the end and taste — mutton liquor varies wildly in salt.
- TimingThe twenty minutes covers the roux and a genuine simmer to cook out the raw flour taste; five to seven minutes of gentle bubbling after the stock goes in is enough. The seeds go in last and need only the single boil-up, or they lose their crunch.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a quarter of sauce, which the book rates at six or seven servings — about three tablespoons each, spooned over the meat rather than pooled under it.
Nasturtium reached European gardens from South America in the sixteenth century, though the species usually credited with that early introduction is the smaller Tropaeolum minus; T. majus, the plant of Victorian kitchen gardens, seems to have followed later. By the eighteenth century the plant was valued in England for its green seedpods as much as its flowers, and pickled they came close enough to the Mediterranean caper that eighteenth-century cookery writers, Hannah Glasse among them, gave directions for pickling them. Capers were imported and dear; nasturtiums grew in any kitchen garden and self-seeded freely, so the substitution was thrift as much as taste. Caper sauce on boiled mutton was a standard Victorian accompaniment, the sharp pickle cutting the fat of a joint that had been simmered rather than roasted, and a plain white or brown roux was the base a cook was expected to produce without thinking, then flavoured with whatever the garden or store cupboard offered.