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Sauce, Store, for Fish, Game, Steaks, Etc
Pound the flesh of six fine anchovies smoothly, and with them six chopped cloves of garlic. If the flavour of garlic is disliked, shallots may be substituted, or they may be omitted. Add a saltspoonful of bruised cloves and the same of cayenne pepper, put the mixture into a saucepan, pour over it half a pint each of mushroom ketchup, walnut pickle, and soy, and simmer all gently for ten minutes. Strain and bottle the sauce for use.
A Victorian "store sauce" — a concentrated bottled seasoning in the Worcestershire mould, made to be kept on the sideboard and used by the spoonful. The quantities are large by modern standards and the finished sauce is essentially a salt-and-vinegar preserve.
- Scale it downHalf a pint each of three liquids gives roughly 1.5 pints before straining (about 850 ml), which is a lot of a condiment used a teaspoon at a time. Quartering the recipe is sensible unless you intend to give bottles away.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is about a quarter of a teaspoon. Two of them here — cloves and cayenne — season the whole batch, so the clove note is subtle and the heat modest.
- Walnut pickleThis means the dark, spiced vinegar from a jar of pickled green walnuts, not the walnuts themselves. It is still sold by British specialist grocers; walnut ketchup is a close relative. Failing either, use a good malt or sherry vinegar and accept a thinner result.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. The Victorian article is a thin, black, salty mushroom liquor, still made commercially in Britain. Mushroom soy or a strong mushroom-and-soy reduction stands in reasonably.
- Soy"Soy" in this period is soy sauce, an import that was often thick and dark. Dark Chinese soy is a reasonable match; Japanese shoyu will make the sauce sharper and lighter.
- AnchoviesProbably salt-packed whole fish rather than oil-packed fillets; if using the latter, rinse them and allow roughly two fillets per fish. Pounding them to a paste first helps them break down in the simmer, though the recipe's straining step shows solids were still expected to remain.
- Do not boil hardTen minutes at a bare simmer is enough to marry the flavours and break down the fish. A rolling boil drives off the vinegar aromatics and concentrates the salt to an unpleasant degree.
- Straining and keepingStrain through muslin into bottles sterilised with boiling water, and seal while hot. The salt and vinegar make this a fairly stable preserve, but a modern kitchen should keep it in the refrigerator once opened.
- Using itA teaspoon or two lifts a fish sauce, a gravy for game, or the pan juices of a steak. Add it at the end of cooking — it is already reduced, and further boiling turns it harsh.
Bottled store sauces were a fixture of the nineteenth-century English kitchen, and this one is a house version of the anchovy-and-soy family that produced Worcestershire, Harvey's sauce and the various "fish sauces" advertised in the same decades. The pattern is consistent: a salty fermented base (anchovy and soy), a sour element (walnut pickle vinegar), an aromatic (garlic or shallot, cloves, cayenne), simmered briefly and strained clear. Anchovy and soy had been paired in English cookery since the eighteenth century, when imported soy from the East Indies arrived alongside the older tradition of anchovy essence; walnut ketchup and mushroom ketchup filled the role tomato would later take. The appeal is plain enough: a household that made its own store sauce could season a plain gravy, a grilled chop or a boiled fish without further work — the same logic that keeps a bottle of Worcestershire in kitchens now.