Home › The Principles of Cookery › YACHT SAUCE (a la Norah)
YACHT SAUCE (a la Norah)
Make a little butter hot, slice a medium-sized Spanish onion, and fry it brown, add a pint of brown stock, a table-spoonful of brown roux, the same measure of Worcester sauce, of mushroom ketchup, and of lemon juice, an ounce or two of grated ham, a teaspoonful of soy, and salt and pepper to taste. Boil until the onion is pulpy, then sieve the sauce, reboil it, and use it for reheating cold fish, game, or meat. This is a good sauce for serving with smoked salmon, dried haddock, or eels.
A sharp, dark, savoury sauce built on the Victorian pantry of bottled condiments. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the ingredients need translating and the seasoning needs restraint.
- Season last, and lightlyGrated ham, Worcester sauce, mushroom ketchup and soy are all salty, and the sauce reduces twice. Add no salt until after the second boil, when the volume has settled.
- Imperial pintCassell's pint is 20 imperial fl oz (about 570 ml), i.e. a shade under 2½ US cups of brown stock. Beef or veal stock is right; a good bought stock works if it is unsalted.
- Brown rouxEqual weights of flour and butter cooked together until the colour of a hazelnut shell; the recipe wants a tablespoonful of the finished roux. Cook it separately and whisk it in, or the sauce will taste raw and pasty.
- SoyIn a book of this date "soy" means soy sauce, then sold as a thick dark bottled condiment. A teaspoon of dark soy sauce or ordinary Japanese-style shoyu is the equivalent; it is there for colour and depth as much as salt.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, black, salty mushroom liquor, not tomato ketchup. It is still made commercially in Britain; failing that, a tablespoon of mushroom soaking liquor from dried porcini plus a few drops of soy is the closest stand-in.
- Spanish onionA mild, sweet yellow onion; the recipe asks for a medium specimen, so around 8 oz. Fry it slowly to a genuine brown rather than a scorch — the bitterness of burnt onion will carry straight through the sieve.
- Grated hamAn ounce or two of dry-cured ham grated on the coarse side of a box grater. It gives up its savour during the boil and the residue is left behind at the sieve; its job is salt and depth, not texture.
- SievingPush the pulped onion through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle rather than merely straining it off — the onion purée is what gives the sauce body once the roux is in.
- Yield and usePerhaps a cup and a half of finished sauce after the two boils, enough for four or so. It is a reheating medium: bring the sauce to a bare simmer, slide in the cooked fish or meat, and warm it through without letting it boil.
Sauces named for yachts, clubs and regattas were a small Victorian genre — dark, bottled, aggressively seasoned mixtures that kept well and made cold leftovers palatable, exactly the conditions of a cruising boat or a shooting lunch. The bones of this one are older than the name: brown stock and roux from the French kitchen, with Worcester sauce, mushroom ketchup and soy layered on top, three bottles said to have been common on British sideboards by the 1880s. Mushroom ketchup in particular was the ordinary English "ketchup" long before tomato took the word, and soy had been imported from Japan and China since the seventeenth century as a keeping condiment rather than a cooking ingredient. The "à la Norah" is the sort of domestic dedication Cassell's printed without explanation, and no particular Norah is documented; such tags are often taken to honour a contributor or a member of the compiler's household, though that can only be guessed at here.