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PIQUANT SAUCE (another way) (Dissolve an ounce and a half)
Dissolve an ounce and a half of butter in a small saucepan over a moderate fire. Throw in a table-spoonful of chopped onions, and stir them about for two minutes, sprinkle a tea-spoonful of flour over them, and beat it with the back of a wooden spoon to prevent it getting into lumps. Add half a pint of stock or broth, a small bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of cayenne. Simmer gently for twenty minutes, then lift out the herbs, pour in half a wine-glassful of vinegar, and add a little pepper and salt if required; let all boil up together, and serve. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for nearly three-quarters of a pint of sauce.
A thin, sharp brown sauce built on a barely-there roux. The one thing to get right is the vinegar: it goes in at the very end and boils only briefly, so the sharpness stays forward rather than cooking away.
- Butter and flourAn ounce and a half of butter is 3 tablespoons. Against a single teaspoon of flour this is far more fat than a modern roux would carry, and the sauce is meant to stay loose and glossy rather than coat a spoon.
- Half a pint of stockIn an English book of this date, half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. Use a well-flavoured brown stock; with this little flour, body comes entirely from the stock itself.
- Half a wine-glassful of vinegarA Victorian wine glass is usually reckoned at roughly 2 to 2½ fl oz, so half is about 2 tablespoons. Plain red wine vinegar or a decent malt vinegar suits it; start at half that amount and taste, since modern vinegar is sold at a standardised acidity while the strength of what was sold loose in the period varied.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon in the three-quarters of a pint this makes is genuinely hot by current expectations. An eighth is closer to a modern seasoning level, and you can add more at the end.
- The herbsTie the parsley, thyme and bay together, or bundle them in a scrap of muslin. The recipe tells you to lift them out, which is far easier from a bouquet than fishing out loose leaves.
- "A moderate fire"Medium heat. The onions want to soften and turn pale gold in their two minutes, not brown, and the flour should cook only enough to lose its raw taste.
- Strain if you want it smoothThe original leaves the chopped onion in, which gives a rustic, slightly textured sauce. Pass it through a fine sieve before the vinegar goes in for a cleaner finish.
- YieldThe book says nearly three-quarters of a pint, close to 1¾ US cups.
"Piquant" is simply the French for sharp or pungent, and sauce piquante occupies a fixed place in the classical French repertoire: a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and shallot, usually finished with chopped gherkins and herbs, and traditionally served with pork and other rich meats. Cassell's version is the English domestic reduction of that idea, with onion standing in for shallot and stock standing in for the long-simmered espagnole a professional kitchen would have had to hand. The book's habit of giving a "probable cost" and a yield in fractions of a pint suggests something about its readership: probably households with one servant or none, cooking from what was likely a costed weekly budget, for whom a sauce that made plain boiled beef interesting may well have been worth more than one that required a stockpot running all week.