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Pontiff's Sauce
Take a quarter of a pound of veal and a quarter of a pound of ham cut into small pieces. Put these into a stewpan with a quarter of a pound of carrots, a quarter of a pound of parsnips, a quarter of a pound of celery, and a quarter of a pound of onions, all sliced, and a quarter of an ounce each of lemon-rind, shallots, and coriander-seed. Pour over these ingredients a pint of vinegar and half a pint of ketchup, and simmer all very gently for three or four hours. About ten minutes before the sauce is taken from the fire put with it half a pint of white wine. Skim and strain the liquid. When it is cold, put the sauce into small bottles. Cork these securely, and store for use. Probable cost, 2s. 6d., exclusive of the wine. A small portion of the pontiff's sauce to be used for flavouring sauces and gravies.
This is a Victorian "store sauce" — a concentrated flavouring bottled and kept on the shelf for months, in the manner of Harvey's sauce or mushroom ketchup. The method belongs to a period before anyone understood what grows in a corked bottle of meat extract, and the preserving instructions here are not adequate.
- Why it fails: no processing, no acidity controlThe liquid is simmered, strained, cooled, and put into corked bottles for indefinite ambient storage, with no sterilisation of the bottles, no boiling-water or pressure processing, and no way to know the finished pH. A strained meat-and-vegetable stock diluted by a pint of vinegar, half a pint of period ketchup and half a pint of wine may land either side of the pH 4.6 line, and there is no measurement in the recipe that tells you which.
- The specific riskAn anaerobic, low-oxygen, room-temperature bottle containing veal and ham extract is a recognised setting for Clostridium botulinum. The 3-4 hour simmer is nowhere near a botulinum spore kill, and the wine is added only ten minutes before the sauce leaves the fire, so the final dilution receives very little heat. Use a current, tested recipe for any shelf-stable sauce.
- "Ketchup" is not tomatoIn books of this period unqualified ketchup generally means mushroom, sometimes walnut, ketchup — a thin, dark, intensely salty and savoury liquid, closer to a fermented condiment than to anything in a modern squeeze bottle. Substituting tomato ketchup would change both the sugar content and the acidity of the mixture.
- Vessel and quantitiesA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid, not a casserole dish. The vegetables and meat total a pound and a half against two pints of liquid, so the pan need not be large, but it must be non-reactive — the pint of vinegar will strip a bare cast-iron or unlined copper pan.
- Coriander-seed by weightA quarter of an ounce is about seven grams, roughly a tablespoon of whole seed; the same weight of pared lemon rind is about the peel of one lemon, and of shallots rather less than a single small one. These are seasoning quantities, not bulk ingredients.
- Cost note"Probable cost, 2s. 6d." is the book's standard household budgeting line, priced for the 1870s-80s British market. It is a period artefact, not a guide to anything.
This belongs to the Victorian class of store sauces, the shelf of bottled flavourings a well-run kitchen kept beside the mushroom ketchup and the Harvey's — small quantities added to gravies and made sauces to give depth without building a fresh stock each time. The name's origin is not documented; ecclesiastical and courtly labels of the French kitchen (a la cardinal, a la royale) were borrowed freely by nineteenth-century cookery books to signal richness and pedigree rather than any actual papal connection. What the recipe really documents is the economics of flavour before commercial bouillon and bottled stock: veal and ham were bought and simmered to nothing simply to be reduced into a vinegar extract, and the resulting bottle was treated as an ingredient in its own right. The confident instruction to "cork these securely, and store for use" is equally of its period — bottling was understood as a matter of keeping air out.