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Salt and Cayenne (Clean and cut up)
Clean and cut up the vegetables very fine, reduce them in the vinegar and fry them brown in the butter and flour in a stewpan; then stir in the stock, also the thyme, bayleaf, and Harvey sauce, let it simmer for twenty minutes; then add the salt and cayenne, strain through a tammy, and it is ready for use.
This is the method for a sharp brown sauce — essentially a sauce piquante built on a brown roux — printed without its ingredient list, as often happened when a book set the quantities in a separate column or in the entry above. Treat the proportions as your own decision.
- No quantities are givenThe verbatim text names vegetables, vinegar, butter, flour, stock, thyme, bayleaf, Harvey sauce, salt and cayenne but measures none of them. If you want a starting point for roughly a pint of sauce, a small onion and a shallot or two with a little carrot, a gill (half a cup) of vinegar, an ounce each of butter and flour and a pint of brown stock will work -- but the proportions are a modern guess, not the book's.
- The hinge: reduce the vinegar almost dryThe hinge: reduce the vinegar first -- "Reduce them in the vinegar" appears before the butter and flour, so the chopped vegetables are simmered in the vinegar and the liquid cooked down before any fat goes in. How far to take it is not stated; taking it well down is what gives the sauce sharpness without rawness.
- Browning the flourThe butter and flour are cooked with the vegetables to a genuine nut-brown, which takes patience over moderate heat and gives the sauce its colour and its slightly toasted flavour. Flour browned past dark chestnut loses thickening power and turns bitter.
- Harvey sauceA bottled English condiment of anchovy, soy, vinegar and spice, sold commercially through the nineteenth century and now effectively gone. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest thing on a modern shelf; add it by the teaspoon and taste, as the two are not identical in strength or seasoning.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan will do, but choose one wide enough that the vinegar can actually reduce.
- TammyA tightly woven worsted cloth through which sauce was forced, usually by two people twisting the ends. A fine conical strainer, or a sieve lined with muslin, does the same job; press the vegetables firmly to extract their body.
- StockThe recipe calls only for stock, and in this context a brown stock is meant. A good unsalted commercial beef stock works; hold back the salt until after straining, since reduction concentrates whatever is already there.
- Yield and useMade to the suggested proportions above it gives roughly a pint. The recipe does not say what it is for; a sharp brown sauce of this kind suits grilled or reheated meat, cutlets and kidneys.
Sauces of this type -- a brown roux, aromatic vegetables, and a vinegar reduction sharpened with a bottled commercial condiment -- were standard equipment in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, in the tradition represented by Francatelli and Soyer and carried on by the later cookery-school manuals. The bottled ingredient is the period detail: Harvey's sauce, a spiced anchovy-and-soy relish of English origin dating from the later eighteenth century, was widely enough stocked that cookery writers could list it as an ordinary store-cupboard item, much as a modern recipe might simply say Worcestershire. Its disappearance is part of why a recipe like this one now reads as incomplete even where the method itself is perfectly sound.