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QUIN'S SAUCE (an old-fashioned Fish sauce)
Put a quarter of a pint of walnut pickle into a saucepan, with a quarter of a pint of port, half a pint of mushroom ketchup, a dozen anchovies, boned and pounded, a dozen sliced shallots, half a tea-spoonful of cayenne, and two table-spoonfuls of soy. Simmer all gently for ten minutes, strain the sauce, and, when cold, bottle for use. Securely corked and stored in a cool place, the sauce will keep for some time.
A bottled fish sauce in the eighteenth-century manner: salty, dark, and used by the spoonful rather than the ladle. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the ingredients now go by other names or must be sourced deliberately.
- The measures are imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (about 150 ml) and half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 300 ml). Total volume before straining is roughly 1 pint / 600 ml; expect a little over 500 ml bottled.
- Walnut pickleThis is the spiced vinegar liquor from a jar of pickled walnuts, not the walnuts themselves. Jarred pickled walnuts are still sold in Britain and their liquor is exactly what is wanted; failing that, use an equal quantity of extra mushroom ketchup with a tablespoon of malt vinegar, accepting that the flavour will be less resinous.
- Mushroom ketchupThe pre-tomato ketchup: mushrooms salted, drained and the liquor boiled with spice. Geo. Watkins still bottles it and it is the largest single ingredient here, so a substitute is not really available. Do not read "ketchup" as tomato.
- Soy"Soy" in a Victorian English kitchen meant imported soy sauce, and its strength and body are not directly comparable with any one modern brand. Any naturally brewed dark soy works; two tablespoons is enough that a low-sodium version is worth considering given everything else in the pot.
- AnchoviesA dozen salted anchovies of the period were whole fish, giving twenty-four fillets; a dozen modern oil-packed fillets is therefore only about half that quantity, so scale up accordingly. Pound them to a paste before they go in or they will not dissolve in ten minutes.
- Keep it at a bare simmerTen minutes of gentle heat is to marry and dissolve, not to reduce. A hard boil drives off the port and pushes the anchovy into stringiness, and the strained sauce turns muddy rather than clear brown.
- Strain properlyThrough a fine sieve, then again through muslin if you want a sauce that pours clear and does not throw sediment in the bottle. The shallots have given everything they have and should be discarded.
- Bottling and storageUse scalded bottles and fill only when the sauce is completely cold. Despite the vinegar, port and salt, this is not a shelf-stable preserve by current standards: keep it in the refrigerator and use it within two or three months.
- How to use itA teaspoon or two at a time, stirred into melted butter or a plain white sauce for boiled or fried fish, or added to a gravy. Served neat and by the spoonful it will overwhelm anything it touches.
The name is generally traced to James Quin (1693-1766), the actor of Irish family who dominated the London stage before Garrick and was as celebrated for his appetite as for his Falstaff; sauces and soups were attached to his name by cookery writers well after his death, and whether he devised any of them is not documented. What the recipe really shows is the English store-sauce habit of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: before commercial Worcestershire and its imitators, a well-run kitchen kept its own bottles of walnut pickle, mushroom ketchup, anchovy essence and "soy" and compounded them into a keeping sauce to be dosed into fish and gravies for months afterwards. The heading itself calls it "old-fashioned", which suggests it was already regarded as a survival when printed.