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Reading Sauce
Take two large earthen jars. Put into one an ounce and a half of bruised shallots and two pints and a half of walnut pickle, set this in a gentle oven, and let it boil until the liquor is reduced to two pints. Put into the other jar a quart of water, three-quarters of a pint of Indian soy, a pounded anchovy, half an ounce of pepper, half an ounce of ginger, and one ounce of mustard-seed, all bruised; add also half an ounce of cayenne. Set this jar in the oven, and let it boil for an hour. Pour the contents of one jar into the other, stir the mixture well together, and let it boil for half an hour. Cover closely, and let it stand in a cool place until the next day. Put into the sauce a quarter of an ounce of dried bay-leaves, and leave it for a week. Strain through a jelly-bag, put the liquor into small bottles, cork these tightly, and store for use. Time, nine days. Sufficient for two quarts of sauce.
A Victorian bottled table sauce of the Worcestershire type, built on walnut pickle and soy rather than tamarind. Nothing here is difficult, but almost every ingredient name has drifted.
- Walnut pickleThis means the dark spiced vinegar drained from a jar of pickled green walnuts, not the walnuts themselves. Walnut ketchup, still sold by a few British makers, is the closest modern equivalent; a good malt vinegar steeped with pickled walnuts will stand in.
- Indian soyNineteenth-century "soy" is soy sauce, then imported through the East India trade and often described as thicker than today's. Use a dark, naturally brewed soy; three-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fluid ounces, about 1 3/4 US cups.
- "Boil" in a gentle ovenThe jars are not meant to reach a rolling boil. A gentle oven is around 300F, and the liquid should hold at a bare simmer while it reduces. Earthenware set directly in a hot oven will crack; use ovenproof stoneware or a heavy covered pan.
- CayenneHalf an ounce is roughly two and a half tablespoons of cayenne in two quarts of sauce, which is fierce even by table-sauce standards. Victorian cayenne was often adulterated and may well have been weaker than the modern article; start with a third of that and taste.
- The anchovyA "pounded anchovy" means one whole salt-cured fish mashed to a paste, roughly a teaspoon or two of anchovy paste. Its job is glutamate depth, not fishiness, and it will mostly break down during the hour in the oven.
- StrainingA jelly-bag is a fine flannel or muslin cone. Let it drip rather than squeezing, or the sauce will be cloudy and throw a sediment in the bottle within days.
- Bay-leaves and the week's restThe bay goes in cold, after everything has been cooked, so its oils are infused rather than driven off. The week of standing is where the raw pepper and mustard edges soften; the sauce tastes harsh if bottled at once.
- StorageCorking tightly is not a preserving process. The sauce is heavily salted and acidic, but keep the bottles refrigerated and use them over a few months rather than treating this as shelf-stable canning.
- YieldTwo quarts, which is a great deal of table sauce. The quantities halve and quarter without trouble.
Reading sauce takes its name from Reading in Berkshire, where it was made and sold commercially through the nineteenth century; the firm of Cocks is the name generally attached to it, and "Cocks's Reading Sauce" was well enough known to be listed alongside Worcestershire in Victorian grocers' catalogues and to turn up in period fiction. Recipes like this one in Cassell's are domestic reconstructions of a proprietary product, an extremely common genre in the era's cookery books, when household compilers routinely offered readers a way to imitate bottled goods at home. The backbone is walnut pickle, the sharp spiced vinegar left over from potting green walnuts, which English kitchens had been using as a ketchup base since the eighteenth century; the soy and cayenne mark the later trade routes that turned that older walnut liquor into the dark, salty, faintly Eastern table sauce the Victorians poured over chops and cold meat.