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PIQUANT SAUCE (another way) (Mix together a table-spoonful)
Mix together a table-spoonful of minced capers and a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Put with them six anchovies which have been boned and pounded, the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, and a table-spoonful of dry mustard. Rub these ingredients with the back of a wooden spoon until they are smoothly mixed, then press them through a coarse sieve. Add a pinch of cayenne, and moisten the whole with two table-spoonfuls of oil and two of vinegar. Stir the paste into half a pint of stock or melted butter; let it boil, strain it, and it is ready for serving. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for nearly three-quarters of a pint of sauce.
A pounded anchovy-and-egg paste let down with stock or butter sauce — closer to a Victorian remoulade than to the French sauce piquante of shallots and vinegar. Two words in the text will mislead a modern cook.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn English cookery books of this period melted butter means the standard flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of water or milk, cooked out. Simply pouring in half a pint of liquid butter will give you a broken, greasy sauce. Stock is the easier and better choice here.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The finished yield of "nearly three-quarters of a pint" is around 14 fl oz, or 1¾ US cups.
- AnchoviesSix anchovies meant six whole salt-cured fish, hence the instruction to bone them. Six modern tinned fillets are roughly three whole fish; twelve fillets is the nearer equivalent, but taste before you commit, as tinned anchovies vary widely in saltiness. Do not salt the sauce until the end.
- A tablespoon of dry mustardThat is a very assertive amount by current taste. Start with two teaspoons, mix the sauce, and add more once it has stood — dry mustard needs a few minutes in liquid to develop its heat.
- The sieveRubbing the paste through a coarse sieve is what makes the sauce smooth; hard yolk and pounded anchovy will otherwise stay grainy. A food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the result through a sieve before it goes into the liquid.
- BoilingBring it just to a boil to marry the flavours and set the thickening, then take it off. Held at a hard boil the oil separates out and the mustard turns bitter.
- The oil and vinegarPlain malt or cider vinegar suits it; wine vinegar is fine. "Oil" in a Victorian English kitchen meant olive oil sold as salad oil, generally mild — a light olive oil rather than a peppery estate bottling.
- "Time, half an hour"That covers the boning, pounding and sieving. The cooking itself is a matter of two or three minutes.
Piquant was one of the workhorse words of nineteenth-century English sauce-making, applied to almost anything sharpened with vinegar, capers, mustard or anchovy and served with plain roast and boiled meats — the standing problem of a cuisine that cooked large joints simply. Cassell's, published in parts from the 1870s and gathered into a single dictionary volume, gives several sauces under the heading, and this "another way" version is essentially a cold remoulade paste pressed into service as a hot sauce: pounded anchovy and hard yolk were the standard Victorian means of giving body and savour before commercial extracts were common. The anchovy in particular does duty as what a modern cook would call umami, and English cooks had leaned on it since at least the eighteenth century, when bottled anchovy essence and ketchups of the same character were staples of the store cupboard. The costing of 8d is characteristic of the book, which was written for households keeping careful accounts and expected a cook to know what a sauce ought to run to.