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Superior Sauce for Flavouring Stews, Etc
Take one table-spoonful of finely-grated horse-radish, mix with it a table-spoonful of curry-powder, a salt-spoonful of cayenne, the grated rind of a fresh lemon, a tea-spoonful of ground ginger, a tea-spoonful of mustard-seed, a quarter of a nutmeg, grated, a salt-spoonful of celery-seed, half a dozen pickled walnuts, and an ounce of garlic. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and pour upon them a quart of ketchup, a pint of port, half a pint of soy, the strained juice of three lemons, and a table-spoonful of essence of anchovy. Bottle the mixture, cork closely, and store in a warm place. Shake the bottle occasionally, and also before using the sauce. It may be used at the end of a week or two.
This is a Victorian store sauce — a concentrated seasoning bottled and kept on the shelf, added by the spoonful to gravies and stews rather than served as a sauce in its own right. The vocabulary is the main obstacle.
- "Ketchup" is not tomatoIn Victorian English cookery an unqualified "ketchup" usually meant mushroom or walnut ketchup: a thin, dark, salty, intensely savoury liquid. Tomato ketchup here would make the sauce sweeter and thicker and would throw the balance out. Use mushroom ketchup if you can find it.
- Soy"Half a pint of soy" is soy sauce; an imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, roughly 1¼ US cups. Combined with the anchovy essence and the salt already in the ketchup, this makes a very salty concentrate, which is the point: it is a seasoning, not a pouring sauce.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon was the tiny spoon set beside the open salt cellar, roughly a quarter teaspoon. A gill, if you meet one elsewhere in this book, is a quarter of a pint — 5 fl oz in imperial measure.
- Essence of anchovyA commercial bottled anchovy extract; still sold in places, though not easily found. Anchovy paste is the nearest thing, and a tablespoon of paste loosened with a little of the port should serve.
- An ounce of garlicAbout six to eight average cloves. Peel and crush or slice them so they actually infuse; left whole they will still be sitting there in a month with little to show for it.
- Strain it, eventuallyThe recipe never says to strain, and the horseradish, mustard seed, celery seed and lemon rind will keep working the whole time. After two or three weeks strain into clean bottles, or the sauce turns muddy and the horseradish dominates everything.
- The "warm place"The warmth is presumably to speed the infusion. Two weeks somewhere around 70F is plenty; after that keep it cool and dark, and refrigerate once opened. Prolonged warmth is more likely to dull the flavour than improve it.
- Yield and useYou end up with roughly two quarts of finished concentrate — a large amount by modern standards. Reckon on a teaspoon to a tablespoon per dish of stew, hash or brown gravy; halving or quartering the whole recipe is sensible.
Store sauces like this were a mainstay of Victorian flavouring, standing on the shelf where a modern cook keeps Worcestershire, soy and stock cubes. A bottle of pungent liquor of this kind was regarded as basic equipment, drawn on to lift plain braises and reheated meat. The ingredient list is a fair portrait of the late nineteenth-century English palate after a century of trade with Asia — curry powder, ground ginger, soy and cayenne sitting beside thoroughly domestic horseradish, pickled walnuts and celery seed. Commercial rivals such as Worcestershire and the various "Indian" sauces were built on much the same logic of fermented fish, vinegar or wine, spice and long maturation, and recipes of this type are generally regarded as the home cook's answer to them.