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POOR MAN'S SAUCE (another way)
Mince an onion finely (or two or three shallots may be used instead). Fry it in a little dripping until it is tender; then pour over it a glass of vinegar and a glass of water or broth, and add a little pepper and salt. Let the sauce simmer gently for a few minutes, and serve. A table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup can be added or not. This sauce may be served with young roast turkey. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A sharp onion-and-vinegar sauce of the plainest kind, built in one pan in under ten minutes. The whole character depends on how far you cook the onion and how much you reduce the vinegar.
- The hinge: soften, don't colour"Fry until tender" points to sweating the onion or shallot over low heat until translucent and sweet, roughly 8-10 minutes. Colouring the onion gives a deeper, more caramelised character than this plain sauce seems to intend.
- What a "glass" meansA wineglassful in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at 2 fl oz, though some writers stretch it to a gill (5 fl oz imperial, about 1/2 cup). The measure is genuinely loose here; start with 1/4 cup vinegar and 1/4 cup water or broth and adjust.
- Choose the vinegarThe recipe says only "vinegar"; in a British household of the period that most likely meant malt vinegar. Cider vinegar or a mild wine vinegar gives a softer result; distilled white vinegar is harsher than anything intended.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping saved from a roast. Butter or a neutral oil works, though dripping is what gives the sauce its savour against so much acid. Use about a tablespoon.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, not the tomato condiment. It is still sold by British makers; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a dash of Worcestershire is the nearest common substitute. Season at the end, as it is salty.
- Simmering time"A few minutes" is enough to take the raw edge off the vinegar and lightly reduce the liquid; a short simmer of a few minutes is all the text asks for. Cook it down much further and it becomes a glaze rather than a sauce.
- Yield and servingThe book gives three or four portions, which is realistic: it is a spooned condiment, not a pouring gravy. Beyond the young turkey suggested here it suits boiled beef, pork, or any plain roast that wants cutting through.
"Poor man's sauce" is generally traced to the French sauce à la pauvre homme, a name attached since at least the eighteenth century to sharp sauces made from onion or shallot, vinegar and whatever cooking liquid was to hand — no stock reduction, no butter enrichment, no wine, though the direction of derivation is traditional rather than documented. Cassell's gives more than one version, and the logic of them is the same: the acid and the allium do the work that a properly made espagnole or a butter emulsion would do in a grander kitchen, at a stated cost of threepence. The mushroom ketchup offered as an optional extra was the standard Victorian shortcut to depth of flavour, a bottled liquor of salted mushrooms that stood in for long-simmered stock. Its presence here, marked "can be added or not", shows exactly the economic register the recipe is pitched at.