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Shallot Sauce, Mild
Pare four or six shallots, and throw them into boiling water slightly salted. Let them boil five minutes; drain them, and boil them again in fresh boiling water: repeat this until the shallots are tender. Drain them, mince them, and stir them into a pint of good melted butter or white sauce. Let all simmer together a few minutes longer, and serve. Some cooks put an inch of lemon-rind with the shallots. Time to boil the shallots, about a quarter of an hour.
A straightforward blanch-and-fold sauce, but one phrase in it means something different now than it did in 1900.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian and Edwardian English cookery, melted butter is a thickened sauce: butter and flour cooked together and let down with water or milk, the proportions varying from book to book. Simply pouring a pint of liquid butter over minced shallots will give you a broken, greasy mess. Use a plain b rather.
- YieldA pint of sauce is generous — enough for several servings alongside boiled or roast mutton, poultry or fish. Halve it for a household meal.
- Why the water is changedThe repeated blanching in fresh boiling water is the whole point of the "mild" in the title. Each change draws off more of the sharp sulphur compounds, leaving sweetness. Two or three changes of five minutes each is the intent; skipping them gives you a pungent sauce, not this one.
- SaltOnly the first blanching water is salted, and most of that salt goes down the drain with it. Season the finished sauce at the end, after the shallots have gone in.
- Size of shallotsLarge banana shallots of the kind sold today are considerably bigger than the bulbs this recipe assumes; four to six of them would overwhelm a pint of sauce. Scale down accordingly.
- The lemon rindAdd it in strips of the yellow zest only, with the shallots in their final water, and lift it out before mincing. Pith left in the pot turns the sauce bitter over fifteen minutes of boiling.
- Final simmer"A few minutes" means just long enough to marry the flavours — three or four over low heat. A flour-based sauce held at a rolling boil will thin as the starch breaks down.
Shallot sauce belongs to the long English tradition of sharp, alliaceous accompaniments to plain roast and boiled meat — the same family as onion sauce for mutton and the sauce Robert of French cookery. Cassell's gives more than one version of the sauce, and the "mild" designation here signals a version fit for delicate palates, invalids, or fish, as against the fierce vinegar-and-shallot sauces served with steak. The repeated blanching is a technique the period applied widely to onions, garlic and cabbage alike, and it is often said to reflect a taste for milder allium flavour in polite dining — a preference that has almost entirely reversed since. "Melted butter" was so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century English kitchens that a much-repeated jibe about England having many religions and one sauce — usually attributed to the Neapolitan Caraccioli, though of uncertain authenticity — turned on it, and its near-disappearance is why the instruction reads so oddly today.