Home › The Principles of Cookery › RELISHING SAUCE (for broiled bones, Fowls, Meat, Fish, etc.)
RELISHING SAUCE (for broiled bones, Fowls, Meat, Fish, etc.)
Put into a stewpan a table-spoonful of chopped onions, with one of chilli vinegar, one of common vinegar, three of water, two of mushroom ketchup, two of Harvey's sauce, and one of anchovies; add to these a pint of melted butter, let the saucer simmer until it adheres to the back of the spoon; add half a tea-spoonful of sugar; it is then ready for use.
A sharp store-cupboard sauce built on the Victorian idea of "melted butter" — which is not clarified butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce. Get that right and the rest is assembly.
- "A pint of melted butter"In this period melted butter means a white sauce made with butter, flour and water or milk, roughly the consistency of thin cream. A pint is 20 fl oz in British measure. Period versions are butter-heavy; something like 4 oz butter and 1 oz flour to a pint of liquid will do, thinned to taste. Plain melted butter alone would simply split when simmered down.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial condiment built on anchovy, soy and walnut ketchup, very widely used in the nineteenth century and now hard to find. Worcestershire sauce is the closest surviving relative and can be used in the same quantity.
- Mushroom ketchupStill sold, thin and black and salty, nothing like tomato ketchup. If you cannot find it, a dark soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid gets you to a similar place.
- "One of anchovies"Most likely a tablespoon of anchovy essence or pounded anchovy rather than whole fillets. If using fillets, mash two or three to a paste first so they dissolve.
- Chilli vinegarVinegar steeped with dried chillies, easily made by leaving a few in a bottle of white wine vinegar for a week. A dash of hot sauce in plain vinegar is a reasonable stand-in.
- The simmer"Until it adheres to the back of the spoon" means reduced enough to coat, not thick or pasty. Keep it barely simmering and stir; a hard boil will break the butter sauce and leave it greasy.
- SaltNone is called for, and none is needed until the end. Anchovy, mushroom ketchup and Harvey's are all salty; taste after reducing and before adding the sugar.
- YieldSomething under a pint and a half: the ingredients come to roughly 26 fl oz before simmering, and the sauce is then reduced. It keeps a few days covered in the refrigerator and reheats gently without boiling.
"Broiled bones" — the rib and joint bones from a roast, scored, seasoned and grilled until crisp — were a staple of the Victorian supper table and the gentleman's club, eaten late with a peppery sauce and a glass of something. This sauce belongs squarely to that world: it is a bottled-condiment recipe, its flavour coming almost entirely from proprietary sauces that a nineteenth-century cook bought rather than made. Harvey's sauce and mushroom ketchup were fixtures of the British larder — Harvey's commercial life is generally placed from around 1800 onward, its origin story traditional rather than documented — and a household cookery dictionary of the period assumed both were on the shelf. The habit of stretching them with butter sauce, vinegar and a little sugar is the ancestor of the modern practice of building a pan sauce out of Worcestershire and stock, and it explains why Victorian relish sauces taste so insistently of anchovy: the fish was the salt and the savour, long before anyone spoke of umami.