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Shallot Gravy, for Broiled Cutlets, Etc
Peel and mince half a dozen shallots. Put them into a saucepan with a wine-glassful of vinegar, a pinch of salt, and a little coarse pepper, and let them boil very gently for five minutes. Pour over them a quarter of a pint of brown gravy, add a small lump of sugar, let the sauce boil again until the gravy is pleasantly flavoured, and strain it into a tureen. If liked, a clove and a little piece of mace may be boiled with the shallots. Time, altogether, twelve to fifteen minutes.
A sharp shallot-and-vinegar reduction of the kind Victorian kitchens kept on hand to cut through grilled meat. The whole thing takes a quarter of an hour, and its success rests on the brown gravy you start with.
- The hinge: the brown gravy"Brown gravy" in Victorian usage generally implies a made, stock-based sauce rather than pan juices — brown stock, often lightly thickened. Pan drippings thinned with water will taste thin and vinegary; use a good reduced beef or veal stock, lightly thickened, or a quality demi-glace concentrate.
- A wine-glassfulIn late-Victorian cookery books a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so roughly 1/4 cup of vinegar. Use a decent red wine vinegar or cider vinegar; distilled white will be harsh.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. Against a 2 fl oz wine-glass of vinegar (itself partly reduced first) that gives a sauce of roughly two and a half parts gravy to one part vinegar, which is deliberately assertive.
- A small lump of sugarA Victorian sugar lump is about a teaspoon. It is there to round off the vinegar, not to sweeten — taste before adding more.
- Coarse pepperCracked rather than finely ground, and it matters here because the sauce is strained: coarse pepper gives perfume without leaving grit or clouding the finished gravy.
- Mace and cloveA blade of mace, not ground — the dried outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole in South Asian and spice shops. One clove is plenty; two will dominate the shallots.
- Simmer, do not boil hard"Boil very gently" describes the first stage with the shallots and vinegar. A hard boil drives off the vinegar's aroma and leaves only its acid, and a small quantity of gravy will reduce quickly.
- Yield and servingAbout 2/3 cup, which will stretch to a few cutlets or chops. A tureen is optional; a warmed jug does the job, and the sauce should go out hot since it will thicken and dull as it cools.
Shallot and vinegar sauces run through nineteenth-century English cookery as the standard sharp accompaniment to broiled meat, in the same family as the sauce Robert and the reduction-based sauces codified in French kitchens of the same era. The shallot, milder and sweeter than onion when cooked down, was prized precisely because it would dissolve into a reduction rather than assert itself; the vinegar and sugar together perform the job now often given to a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of mustard. The optional clove and blade of mace are a survival of the older English taste for warm spice in savoury sauces, a habit that faded through the twentieth century.