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Volage Sauce
Pound well in a mortar six anchovies, six shallots, four cloves of garlic, half an ounce of cayenne pepper, and add one pint of vinegar. Put all together into a jar, let it stand ten days, strain it through muslin, and bottle for use. It is much improved by keeping.
A cold-infused bottled store sauce of the Victorian type: pounded anchovy and aromatics steeped in vinegar, strained, and used by the drop rather than the spoonful. Two things decide whether it works — the strength of the anchovies and the fact that it is never cooked.
- The cayenne is the thing to watchHalf an ounce of cayenne is roughly two and a half tablespoons in a single pint of vinegar. That is a deliberately fierce seasoning sauce, meant to be shaken over chops, fish or gravy a few drops at a time. Halve it if you want something you can pour.
- AnchoviesThe book most likely means the salt-packed anchovies then sold from the cask, rinsed of their salt before pounding. Oil-packed fillets work but carry oil into the vinegar, which will separate and cloud; blot them well first. Note that "six anchovies" means six whole cured fish rather than six fillets, so the weight is approximate -- allow roughly 25-50 g.
- Mortar or machineThe pounding is only there to break everything down so the vinegar can extract it. A small food processor or a stick blender in a jug does the same job in seconds; the mixture should be a coarse paste before the vinegar goes in.
- Which vinegarA Victorian kitchen would most likely have used malt vinegar, which suits the anchovy well. Cider vinegar is a good substitute. Avoid anything below 5 per cent acidity, since the acid is what keeps the raw fish and garlic in check during the steeping.
- The ten daysSteep in a sealed glass jar out of direct light, shaking it once a day. Room temperature is what the original assumes and the acidity supports it, but a cool larder or the door of the refrigerator gives a cleaner result and costs nothing but a few extra days of extraction.
- StrainingMuslin means a double layer of cheesecloth or a jelly bag. Let it drip rather than squeezing it, or the sauce goes cloudy with anchovy solids and sediment will settle in the bottle.
- Yield and keepingAbout a pint, slightly less after straining. Bottle in sterilised glass with a non-corroding cap — vinegar will rust a bare metal lid. Refrigerated it keeps for months, and the claim that it improves with age is fair: the raw garlic edge softens and the heat integrates over the first few weeks.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the bottled store sauce, when English households might keep a shelf of pungent vinegars to season plain grilled meat and boiled fish: Harvey's sauce, anchovy essence, mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire and dozens of privately compounded rivals. Several of them draw on a similar palette of ingredients — anchovy for savour, shallot and garlic for aromatics, cayenne for bite, vinegar as the solvent and the preservative — though they differ widely in composition and method. The name is presumably the French volage, meaning fickle or flighty, a piece of the mock-French naming that Victorian cookery books applied freely to store sauces; no origin for it is documented here, and it is best read as a period label rather than evidence of a French pedigree. What the recipe does show plainly is how such sauces were made: no cooking, no reduction, just a long cold steeping in acid, which is why the instruction that it improves by keeping was worth printing.