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Pink Sauce, for Meat or Fish
Take a large, wide-mouthed bottle, and put into it a quarter of a pint of port, a pint of vinegar, a dessert-spoonful of walnut ketchup, two dessert-spoonfuls of anchovy liquor, two cloves of garlic, or, if preferred, three shallots, a quarter of an ounce of cayenne, and one-eighth of an ounce of cochineal. Stir the mixture briskly for a minute or two, then cork it up, and leave it in a cool place for two days, stirring it up every now and then. Strain through a tamis, and keep the sauce in small bottles closely corked until wanted; this sauce may be used as a relish for cold meat, or to flavour fish sauces. Sufficient for a pint and a quarter.
A cold-infused store sauce in the Victorian manner: no cooking, just steeping and straining. Two of its ingredients have effectively left the shops, and the heat level is higher than the modest quantities suggest.
- Imperial measuresA quarter-pint of port is 5 imperial fl oz, about 145 ml or a generous half cup; the pint of vinegar is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml. The dessert-spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — roughly 10 ml.
- Walnut ketchupA thin, dark, spiced liquor made from green walnuts, once widely sold and now found only from specialist makers or made at home. Mushroom ketchup is the closest widely available substitute; Worcestershire sauce will do at a pinch, though it brings its own tamarind sweetness.
- Anchovy liquorNot fish sauce in the Southeast Asian sense but the salty brine or oil clinging to salted anchovies. Drain it from a tin or jar of anchovies, or use Italian colatura di alici, which is the same idea and considerably more concentrated — start with half the stated amount.
- CochinealPurely colouring, contributing nothing to flavour. Modern cochineal extract or carmine is sold as a food colour and is very strong: a few drops will do the work of the eighth of an ounce here. The sauce works perfectly well without it, though it will finish brown rather than pink.
- The cayenneA quarter of an ounce is about 7 g in a pint and a quarter of liquid — this is a fierce sauce, meant to be shaken over cold beef by the drop rather than poured. Victorian cayenne was also variable in strength; with modern standardised powder, consider starting at half and tasting after the two days.
- TamisA drum sieve of woven cloth. A fine-mesh strainer lined with a double layer of muslin does the same job; the point is to hold back the cayenne sediment and the garlic so the bottled sauce stays clear.
- Keeping itThe vinegar and salt do the preserving, and the solids are strained out, so the finished sauce is stable — but bottle it into sterilised bottles, and once opened keep it in the refrigerator. Shake before use; some cayenne will always settle.
- YieldA pint and a quarter, about 700 ml, which is a great deal of a condiment used a teaspoon at a time. Halving the quantities is sensible unless you intend to give bottles away.
Bottled "store sauces" were the backbone of the Victorian larder: sharp, salty, keeping liquids kept in the sideboard to enliven the cold joint that appeared at Monday lunch after the Sunday roast. Cassell's gives a number of them, and their family resemblance — vinegar, a fermented ketchup, cayenne, sometimes wine — is the ancestry of the commercial sauces that eventually displaced them from the domestic kitchen. The colour is the whole point of the name: cochineal, made from the dried bodies of scale insects farmed in Mexico and the Canaries, was the standard red food colouring of the nineteenth century and turns up throughout Victorian cookery books in everything from jellies to icing. Nothing in the recipe is cooked, which was part of the appeal — a housekeeper could assemble it in a bottle, stir it in passing over two days, and then keep the bottles corked until wanted, without lighting the range.