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Sauce for Lamb
Take four tablespoonfuls of chopped mint leaves, pour over them a quarter of a cup of boiling water, let stand until cold and then add two tablespoonfuls of vinegar and enough orange marmalade to make a thick sauce.
A cold mint sauce built on marmalade rather than sugar, meant for sliced cold lamb. It comes together in minutes and needs only a little judgement about sweetness.
- YieldClose to a cup once the marmalade is in, since the quarter cup of infusing water is not drained off. It is a condiment, not a pouring sauce.
- The infusion is the pointThe quarter cup of boiling water over the chopped mint draws the flavour out; the recipe is explicit that it should stand until cold before the vinegar goes in.
- Mint quantityFour tablespoons of chopped leaves is roughly a packed half cup of loose spearmint before chopping. Spearmint is the traditional choice; peppermint is too aggressive here.
- VinegarThe recipe does not specify a type; cider or white wine vinegar suits it. Malt vinegar also works and is closer to the English mint-sauce tradition.
- "Enough marmalade"Start with two tablespoons and add more to taste. Marmalades vary enormously in sugar and bitterness, so the amount that makes a "thick sauce" in one jar will oversweeten from another.
- TextureCoarse-cut marmalade leaves visible rind, which some will like and some will not. Warming the marmalade briefly and pressing it through a sieve gives a smoother sauce without changing the flavour.
- KeepingThe acidity and sugar hold it a few days covered in the refrigerator, though the mint dulls after the first day. Make it the morning you want it.
Mint with lamb is long established in British cooking, and bottled and homemade mint sauces — chopped mint, sugar, vinegar — were a fixture of nineteenth-century English tables. The marmalade version uses a jar already in the cupboard to do the work of sugar and body at once.