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Rump Steak, Piquant Sauce For
Put a wine-glassful of ale into a small saucepan, with a wine-glassful of claret, a wine-glassful of ketchup or Harvey's sauce, a tea-spoonful of garlic vinegar, and an ounce of fresh butter. Stir the mixture over the fire till it is thoroughly heated, and serve poured hot upon the steak. Time, five or six minutes.
A quick pan sauce of the plainest Victorian kind: four liquids, a knob of butter, and no thickening. The main decisions are what the vague ingredient names meant and how hard to let it boil.
- Wine-glassfulConventionally reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, so about 1/4 cup. Three of them (ale, claret, and the ketchup or Harvey's) plus a teaspoon of vinegar and an ounce of butter gives around 3/4 cup of finished sauce — enough for two large steaks, or four modest ones.
- KetchupNot tomato. A nineteenth-century English ketchup was mushroom or walnut: thin, dark, salty and sharp, closer to a mushroom soy than to anything in a squeeze bottle. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet and cloudy.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial bottled condiment of the period, anchovy-based with soy, vinegar, garlic and spice. It is no longer readily available. Worcestershire is its nearest surviving relative and works in the same quantity.
- AleUse a British-style bitter or brown ale, not a hopped IPA. Modern high-bitterness beer reduces to something harsh, and this sauce has no sugar or stock to balance it.
- Garlic vinegarMade by steeping crushed garlic in wine vinegar for a week or two. A teaspoon of red wine vinegar with a small crushed clove is a fair stand-in; the vinegar matters more than the garlic, which is present only as a background note.
- The hinge — keep it below a boil"Thoroughly heated" is the instruction, not "reduced." Butter stirred into a barely-simmering sauce stays emulsified and glossy; at a rolling boil it separates and the sauce turns thin and greasy. Add the butter last, off the direct heat, and swirl it in.
- SaltBoth ketchup and Harvey's-type sauces are very salty, so taste before adding any. Season the steak, not the sauce.
- TimingFive or six minutes is about right for warming through in a small pan. Make it while the steak rests, and pour it over at the table rather than letting it sit.
Piquant sauces of this type belong to the great age of the English bottled condiment, when a cook's store cupboard held mushroom and walnut ketchups, anchovy essence, and proprietary blends such as Harvey's, Worcestershire and Reading sauce. All of them did the same job: they supplied in a few spoonfuls the salt, acid and savoury depth that a long-simmered French sauce got from stock and reduction. That suited a household serving a grilled or fried rump steak, a cut valued in Victorian Britain for flavour rather than tenderness and often thought to need something assertive alongside. Harvey's sauce is generally traced to a London recipe of the late eighteenth century and was widely bottled through the nineteenth; it has since disappeared from shelves, while Worcestershire, its close cousin in composition, survived. The claret-and-ale combination here works on a simple logic: wine for body, beer for bitterness, a bottled sauce for the salt, and butter to bind the lot.