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Universal Sauce
Into a pint of stock put a glass of white wine, salt, pepper, the grated peel of a lemon, a bay-leaf, and a dash of lemon-juice. Let this macerate by the side of the fire for eight hours, and serve, poured over meat, game, fish, or vegetables. This sauce will keep good for several days.
The interest here is in the idea — a single aromatic infusion meant to serve for meat, game, fish or vegetables — rather than in the method, which cannot be reproduced safely. The points below explain the archaic measures and then why this particular procedure fails.
- The hinge is the eight-hour hold, and it is the problemMeat stock kept "by the side of the fire" sits at whatever temperature that corner of the hearth happens to be, typically somewhere between warm and barely steaming. Held there for eight hours, a cooked stock is in the range where Clostridium perfringens and Bacillus cereus spores that survived the original boil germinate and multiply; both are classic stock-and-gravy organisms, and neither is neutralised by the wine or the lemon.
- "Will keep good for several days"The recipe states neither where it is to be kept nor whether it is to be re-boiled, both of which a period kitchen would have relied on. A low-acid stock stored for days without refrigeration and without a measured re-heat compounds the first problem rather than solving it. If you want a keeping sauce of this kind, use a current recipe with stated temperatures and storage.
- A glass of wineIn Victorian cookery books a wine glass is a conventional measure of roughly 2 fl oz, not a modern tumbler, though usage is not consistent and larger figures are sometimes given. Against an imperial pint of stock that is about one part wine to ten, which tells you this was meant as a seasoning, not a braising liquid.
- A pintCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial pint of 20 fl oz about 2½ US cups, roughly a fifth more than an American pint.
- MacerateUsed here in its older, looser sense of steeping or infusing, not the modern sense of softening fruit in sugar or acid. Nothing is being broken down; the intent is simply to draw the lemon peel and bay into the stock.
- Grated lemon peelNineteenth-century lemons were untreated. Modern citrus is routinely waxed and may be sprayed, so any recipe calling for a whole peel by weight or by grating wants unwaxed fruit, scrubbed.
A "universal" sauce is a thoroughly nineteenth-century piece of household economy: one preparation kept standing in the larder to be poured over whatever came to table, in place of the separate velouté, poivrade and fish sauce a professional kitchen would keep going. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households, is full of this logic — the aim is a single flavoured liquid, cheap in wine and long on aromatics, that does the work of several. The flavour profile, stock lifted with white wine, bay, lemon zest and a squeeze of juice, is essentially a thin uncooked cousin of the sauces built on the same aromatics in classical French practice, and it is a reminder that before reliable refrigeration a sauce's chief virtue was that it kept, or was believed to.