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Mint Sauce
4 tablespoons minced mint leaves 1 tablespoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 6 tablespoons vinegar Place mint in small covered bowl or cup and cover with sugar; let it stand one hour. Add salt to hot vinegar and pour over the mint; let this infuse for ten minutes before serving.
A cold English-style sauce built on macerated mint and hot vinegar. It comes together in about ten minutes of actual work, with an hour of waiting.
- YieldMakes roughly 1/2 cup, enough for four to six servings. It is a condiment spooned over meat, not a pour-over sauce, so a tablespoon per plate is plenty.
- The sugar step is the pointAn hour under sugar draws juice out of the bruised leaves, so the finished sauce tastes green rather than merely sour. Skipping it gives you vinegar with leaves floating in it.
- Which mintThe recipe says only 'mint leaves'; spearmint is the traditional English choice. Peppermint is far more aggressive and reads medicinal in this quantity; use it only if nothing else is available, and cut the amount.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar was not standardised the way today's 5 percent product is, so strength varied. Cider or malt vinegar suits the sauce better than distilled white, and if the result bites too hard, thin it with a tablespoon of water rather than adding more sugar.
- Hot, not boilingThe recipe asks only for hot vinegar; heat it just to steaming. The hotter it goes on, the duller the leaves will look.
- Infusion timeTen minutes is the minimum. The sauce holds well for a day or two refrigerated in a covered jar, though the mint darkens; make it the morning of the meal if appearance matters.
- Its actual partnerDespite its placement in the fish chapter, mint sauce is the classic accompaniment to roast lamb and mutton. It works with oily fish such as mackerel, but do not expect it to flatter a delicate white fillet.
Mint sauce is the English answer to rich, fatty roast meat: sharp vinegar and sugar cutting through lamb or mutton, a pairing that cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic treated as fixed by the nineteenth century. The technique here, burying the leaves in sugar before adding hot vinegar, is a small piece of household chemistry, and it survives in British recipes to this day. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook reflects how such volumes worked: baking pamphlets were bulked out into full general cookbooks, sweeping in sauces, relishes and table basics that had nothing to do with flour, so that the book would stay in the kitchen year-round. The filing of mint sauce under fish may be a nod to mackerel, which older English cookery did serve with gooseberry sauce, rather than an error.