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Wow Wow Sauce, for Boiled Beef or Bouilli
Wash and pick a handful of parsley, and shred the leaves finely. Put them into a basin, and mix with them three bruised pickled walnuts. Make half a pint of melted butter, using for the purpose the liquor in which the meat was boiled. Put it into a saucepan over a gentle fire, and stir into it a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, a table-spoonful of vinegar, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a table-spoonful of port. Simmer the sauce, stirring it all the time, till it is thick. Add the parsley and the walnuts, simmer the sauce a minute longer, and serve. If liked, pickled cucumbers may be used instead of walnuts, and the flavour of the sauce may be varied by the addition of any of the piquant vinegars.
A quick pan sauce built on the beef's own cooking liquor. The only real translation problem is the phrase "melted butter," which in a Victorian book does not mean butter that has been melted.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery this is the standard flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together, then whisked with the liquid. Here the liquid is beef broth rather than water or milk, which is what gives the sauce its body and savour.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. That yields enough sauce for four to six servings alongside a boiled joint.
- Skim the liquor firstBoiled-beef broth carries a heavy fat cap. Lift it off before making the sauce, or the finished result may be greasy.
- Pickled walnutsUnripe green walnuts pickled in spiced malt vinegar, still sold in British supermarkets and by mail order elsewhere. They are black, soft and intensely malty-savoury. The suggested substitute of pickled cucumber is milder and sharper rather than an equivalent.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, an ancestor of the tomato sort; still made commercially and sometimes shelved with the Worcestershire sauce. A dash of Worcestershire plus a little soy is the nearest common stand-in, though it is sweeter and less earthy.
- "Mixed mustard"Mustard powder already slaked with water to a paste, as against dry powder. English mustard from a jar is the direct descendant.
- Keep the parsley lateThe instruction to add it in the last minute matters. Simmered longer, the leaves go drab olive and the sauce loses the fresh top note that offsets the vinegar and walnut.
- Piquant vinegarsThe period meant vinegars steeped with tarragon, chilli, shallot, garlic or elder flowers. Tarragon vinegar is the easiest to find and suits beef well.
Wow Wow Sauce belongs to William Kitchiner, the London optician, amateur musician and eccentric whose Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook's Oracle (1817) was among the first English cookbooks to give quantities a modern reader can follow. His original version was likewise built for boiled beef or bouilli, the thrifty centrepiece of countless Victorian dinners, and the sauce exists to rescue a joint that has given most of its flavour to the pot: it takes back some of that flavour as broth, then piles on the aggressive store-cupboard condiments of the age -- mustard, pickled walnuts, mushroom ketchup, port and a piquant vinegar. The name is unexplained by Kitchiner himself and is generally taken as playful nonsense, in keeping with a man who also published a collection of his own songs and gave dinners governed by a printed notice about punctuality. That such sauces went on being made says something about how firmly the pickled walnut and the ketchup bottle held their place in the British larder.