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Regent's Store Sauce
Infuse six shallots, four cloves, and an ounce of cayenne in a bottle with a quart of vinegar for ten days, and shake the bottle every day. Strain the liquor, and mix thoroughly with it a quarter of a pint of soy, a quarter of a pint of mushroom ketchup, and a tea-spoonful of the essence of anchovy. Put the sauce into small bottles, cork securely, and store for use.
A cold-infused store sauce in the Regency style: no cooking, just ten days of steeping and a set of savoury concentrates stirred in at the end. The measurements are imperial, and one of them is far larger than a modern cook expects.
- The cayenne is the hingeAn ounce is about 28 g of pure ground cayenne to a quart of vinegar — ferocious by any modern standard, and nineteenth-century cayenne was often adulterated, so its heat need not have matched a modern ground cayenne. Treat this as a seasoning to be used by the teaspoon at table, not a pouring sauce, and consider starting with a fraction of the chilli if you want something you will actually finish.
- Imperial measuresA quart here is 40 fl oz (1.14 litres), not the 32 fl oz US quart. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, roughly two-thirds of a US cup. Total yield is around 1.4 litres before straining losses, which fills five or six 250 ml bottles.
- "Soy"In Victorian English this means soy sauce, imported and sold as a condiment in its own right. A dark, naturally brewed soy is closest to what was on sale; light or low-sodium versions will leave the sauce thin in both colour and savour.
- Mushroom ketchupThe salted, pressed and spiced liquor of field mushrooms, still made commercially in Britain and easy enough to find online. It is not tomato ketchup and there is no substitute that behaves the same way; a strong mushroom or dark soy-and-Marmite improvisation will change the sauce entirely.
- Essence of anchovyA concentrated anchovy paste thinned with vinegar and spice, sold in bottles into the twentieth century. Modern anchovy paste in a tube is the nearest thing; a teaspoon of it, mashed smooth with a little of the vinegar before it goes in, will not leave lumps.
- VinegarUse a malt or cider vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity. The acidity, plus the salt from the soy and anchovy, is what keeps this sauce stable at room temperature without any heating.
- BottlingWash and dry the bottles in a hot oven or a dishwasher cycle before filling, and use new corks or plastic-lined screw caps — the sauce is corrosive to bare metal lids. Strain twice through muslin if you want it clear; the cayenne throws a heavy sediment.
- Shallots and clovesPeel and bruise the shallots rather than slicing them, so the liquor stays clear, and pull them out at straining. Four cloves in a quart is restrained; leave them in longer than ten days and the clove will dominate.
Store sauces — bottled, keeping, sharply savoury — were the backbone of the nineteenth-century English larder, poured into gravies and hashes and over chops to supply depth that plain roast meat lacked. Their common ancestry lies in the anchovy-and-spice ketchups of the eighteenth century, themselves an English reading of imported Asian fish and soy sauces, and the family includes Worcestershire, Harvey's and a long line of proprietary bottles. The Regency name is the sort of prestige attribution these recipes attracted: sauces, puddings and cuts of meat were routinely styled after the Prince Regent or his circle, and such names are traditionally rather than documentably connected to the person. Cassell's prints it as a domestic alternative to the bought bottle, at a time when commercial sauce makers were guarding their formulas and household compilers were happy to offer approximations.