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Shallot, for Venison
Strip off the skin from some fine shallots-about a pint in quantity-boil them in salted water for five minutes, then throw off the first water, and add more boiling water to them. If the sauce is desired very mild, change the water until they are quite done, and throw in salt enough to flavour. Drain them thoroughly. Serve in good melted butter or gravy. This sauce is often served as an accompaniment to venison when the true flavour of the meat is not relished. Time, about fifteen minutes to boil. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for this quantity.
A plain boiled-shallot sauce of the older English school, thickened with what the Victorians called melted butter. Two terms in it mean something other than what a modern cook would assume.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together, let down with about half a pint of water or light stock and finished with more butter. Proportions differ from book to book, some using considerably more butter than flour. Simply pouring warm butter over the shallots gives a greasy, split result and is not what is intended.
- A pint of shallotsShallots were measured by volume here; a pint by capacity is roughly 1 lb / 450 g of peeled bulbs. Note that an imperial pint is about 2.4 US cups, not two. Use small round shallots so they cook evenly whole.
- The double boiling is deliberateDiscarding the first water strips the harsh sulphur compounds. Repeating it, as the recipe allows, gives a very mild sauce but also leaches most of the flavour, so change the water twice at most unless you genuinely want a near-neutral onion.
- TimingFifteen minutes total suits small whole shallots; larger ones need twenty to twenty-five, and the poaching should stop while they still hold their shape. Overcooked shallots collapse into strings in the sauce.
- Drain hardThe instruction to drain thoroughly is the hinge. Wet shallots will thin a flour-thickened butter sauce to nothing. Tip them into a sieve and leave a minute or two before combining.
- Gravy optionIf serving with roast venison, the pan juices are the better choice — deglaze the roasting tin, strain, and fold the shallots through rather than making a separate white sauce.
- YieldA pint of shallots with about half a pint of sauce should serve roughly six to eight as an accompaniment.
Cassell's is unusually frank about the purpose of this sauce: it exists "when the true flavour of the meat is not relished." Nineteenth-century venison came largely from park deer and was often hung before cooking, and a whole family of strong accompaniments — sweet-sharp Cumberland sauce, currant jelly, port reductions, and blunt onion sauces like this one — grew up to sit alongside it. Shallots had a particular reputation for being milder and finer than the common onion, and here they are boiled twice over, which draws out what remains of their assertiveness. The pricing in shillings and pence, a standard feature of Cassell's entries, was there so a household cook could cost a dinner in advance; 1s 6d for a pint of shallots marks them out as a comparatively expensive vegetable.