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Poor Man's Sauce, for Cold Meats
Pick a handful of young parsley-leaves, and chop them small. Put with them a table-spoonful of chopped shallots, or a dozen young green onions finely minced, a tea-spoonful of salt, and half a tea-spoonful of pepper. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, put them into a tureen, and pour over them two table-spoonfuls of salad-oil and four of vinegar. Stir all together and serve. If liked, a table-spoonful of pickled French beans or gherkins cut small may be added to the sauce. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
An uncooked vinaigrette-style relish, sharper than a modern dressing and meant to cut through cold roast beef or mutton. Nothing here needs updating except your expectations about the proportions.
- The oil-to-vinegar ratioTwo spoons of oil to four of vinegar is the reverse of a modern vinaigrette, which runs about three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is deliberately austere — this is a sauce for fatty cold meat, not a salad dressing. If it reads as brutally acidic, use a mild wine vinegar rather than distilled, or shift the balance toward the oil.
- Salad-oilIn Victorian British usage this generally meant olive oil, often of the milder or refined grades, though other oils were also sold under the name. A light olive oil or a neutral seed oil both fit; a peppery extra-virgin will fight the vinegar.
- Shallots and green onionsA dozen "young green onions" means spring onions the thickness of a pencil, used whole with their green tops — not a dozen bulb onions. A tablespoon of chopped shallot is the milder option of the two.
- TureenSimply a lidded serving bowl. Any non-reactive bowl works; avoid untreated aluminium or cast iron, which the vinegar will pick up a metallic taste from.
- Let it stand"Time, a few minutes to prepare" covers the chopping; the recipe itself directs you to stir and serve at once. If you prefer, fifteen to thirty minutes at room temperature lets the salt draw juice from the onion and takes off some of the raw edge.
- Pickled French beansPickled whole green beans, which turn up in Victorian pickle recipes and are uncommon now. Cornichons or gherkins do the same job; drain and chop them fine so they read as texture rather than lumps.
- Yield and keepingThe stated three or four persons means a few spoonfuls each alongside cold meat, roughly half a cup in total. It keeps a day or two refrigerated, though the parsley dulls and the onion grows assertive.
The name is often said to echo a French sauce pauvre homme, though the connection is not certain and the French sauce of that name is not always the same thing. Its logic is thrift on two counts: it uses no butter, stock or reduction, and its real purpose is to make yesterday's joint worth eating again — a constant preoccupation of Victorian household cookery, where a large roast was expected to reappear cold at supper and again in a made dish. The costing at fourpence, printed as a matter of course in this book, is itself a period detail: readers were expected to weigh a recipe by the penny before they weighed it by the palate.