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Sharp Sauce, for Cutlets, Boiled Beef, Boiled Mutton, Etc
Skin and mince four shallots, and put them into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter and four table-spoonfuls of vinegar. Stir these over the fire till the vinegar is reduced and the butter looks clear. Mix one ounce of flour smoothly into it, and keep stirring over a brisk fire until the paste is slightly coloured without being at all burnt. Add gradually a pint of broth, and let the sauce simmer for twenty minutes. Stir in a table-spoonful of minced gherkins, a table-spoonful of blanched and chopped parsley, and a little pepper and salt, if required. Boil, skim, and serve very hot. A little browning should be added if necessary. Time, altogether, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A brown roux sauce sharpened with shallot vinegar and gherkin — essentially a household sauce piquante. Nothing here is obscure, but a few of the measures and terms are Victorian.
- The pint is imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so use 2½ US cups of broth. The recipe specifies only 'broth'; a plain beef or veal stock suits, and a well-flavoured one helps, though the recipe does allow pepper and salt to be added at the end.
- Reduce the vinegar properlyThe hinge of the dish is cooking the shallots and vinegar down until the pan looks buttery and clear rather than watery. Stop short of that and the sauce keeps a raw acetic edge that twenty minutes of simmering will not soften.
- An ounce of flourAbout 3½ tablespoons, or 28 g. With a pint of liquid that gives a lightly napping sauce, not a thick one — correct for spooning over cutlets.
- "Slightly coloured without being at all burnt"This is a blond-to-light-brown roux, cooked perhaps three or four minutes over medium-high heat and stirred constantly. Burnt flour turns the whole pint bitter and cannot be rescued.
- BrowningVictorian browning was typically burnt-sugar caramel, made at home or bought bottled, used mainly for colour. Modern equivalents are bottled gravy browning or a few drops of dark soy; the recipe treats it as optional ('if necessary').
- Blanched parsleyThirty seconds in boiling water then straight into cold water. It fixes the green and takes off the coarse note, which matters when the parsley goes in at the very end.
- GherkinsUse small sour vinegar-pickled cornichons, not sweet bread-and-butter pickles, which will unbalance the sauce entirely. Add them at the finish so they stay firm.
- Skimming and saltSimmer with the pan slightly off-centre on the burner so the skin of fat and starch collects on one side and can be lifted off. Season only after the reduction, as reduced stock and gherkin brine both carry salt.
- YieldRoughly 2 cups of finished sauce, enough for six to eight portions of meat, as the original states. It reheats well but thickens on standing; loosen with a spoonful of stock.
This is the English kitchen's version of sauce piquante, the classic French preparation in which shallots reduced in vinegar are carried in a brown roux-based sauce and finished with something sharp and chopped — capers, gherkins, or both. Its long-standing job was to cut through plain boiled or reheated meat, which is exactly the list Cassell's gives in the title: cutlets, boiled beef, boiled mutton. Sauces of this family are sometimes loosely connected to the older poivrade and pepper sauces of French cookery, though the lineage is not a settled one. The costing of eightpence, given as a matter of course alongside the timing, is characteristic of Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, which routinely supplies a probable cost and a time for its recipes.