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Shallot Sauce, for Boiled Mutton, Poultry, Chops, and Steaks
Mince four shallots, lay them on the corner of a napkin, pour cold water over them, and press them with a cloth till dry. Put them into a saucepan with a quarter of a pint of stock, add a little pepper and salt, and let them simmer gently till they are tender. Mix with them a quarter of a pint of good melted butter, and stir the sauce again over the fire, but do not allow it to boil up. Add a dessert-spoonful of chilli vinegar, and serve. Tirue, altogether, a quarter of an hour.
A small, sharp English butter sauce built on softened shallots. The one thing to get right is the final stage: once the melted butter is in, the sauce is warmed only, never boiled, or the emulsion breaks.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English cookery melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and flour worked together and let down with water or milk, in proportions that vary from book to book. Plain liquid butter here will separate and taste greasy.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml, or roughly three-fifths of a US cup. You need that much stock and the same again of the butter sauce, giving about 10 fl oz of finished sauce.
- Rinsing the shallotsPressing the minced shallots in a cloth under cold water takes off some of the raw pungency, which is the usual reason given for the step. Squeeze them genuinely dry before they go in the pan.
- SimmeringFive to eight minutes at a bare simmer will soften four shallots in that little stock. Keep the pan half-covered so the liquid does not vanish before they are tender.
- Do not let it boil upAfter the butter sauce goes in, hold it below a simmer and stir, as the recipe directs. Hard boiling can make the sauce oil off.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies. A teaspoon or two of any good hot pepper vinegar does the same job, or use cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne.
- YieldAbout 10 fl oz, enough for four to six portions of boiled mutton, chops or steak. Serve it hot in a warmed boat, as it thickens as it cools.
Shallot sauces of this kind belong to the nineteenth-century English repertoire of small, sharp sauces meant to cut through plain boiled and grilled meat, particularly mutton, whose fat needed something acid alongside it. The chilli vinegar is the period marker: bottled pepper vinegars were common household preparations and commercial lines from the middle of the century onward. The technique of washing minced onion or shallot in a cloth before cooking appears throughout English and French sauce work of the era; it is a practical answer to the harshness of raw alliums in a sauce that will only be gently warmed rather than long-cooked.