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Ten Peppercorns (Cut up the carrot celery)
Cut up the carrot, celery, shalot, and put them with the garlic, peppercorns, bayleaf, and milk into a stewpan and let them boil up: mix the butter and flour together, whisk on the boiling milk and vegetables, and let it boil for ten minutes. Then strain through a tammy-cloth, re-heat, and add the cream.
This is a classic infused white sauce — a béchamel built on vegetable-scented milk and thickened with kneaded butter and flour. The title is a fragment of the ingredient list that once sat above the method, and the quantities have not survived with the text.
- Missing quantitiesThe original ingredient list is not reproduced here, so the proportions are genuinely unknown. A workable reconstruction would be roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to a pint of milk, with a small carrot, a stick of celery, one shallot, a clove of garlic, a bay leaf and the ten peppercorns of the title, finished with 2–4 tablespoons of cream.
- The hinge: whisk hot into cold-ish, then keep whiskingThe butter and flour are worked into a paste and the boiling milk is whisked onto it, not the other way round. Pour in a little at a time and whisk continuously, or the paste seizes into lumps that no amount of straining will fully rescue.
- Ten minutes of boiling is the pointThis looks long by modern instinct, but it is what cooks out the raw-flour taste and lets the vegetables give up their flavour. Use a heavy pan, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and stir the bottom often — flour-thickened milk scorches quickly.
- ShalotSimply an older spelling of shallot. One medium shallot, halved, is enough; the sauce should taste of milk and aromatics, not onion.
- Tammy-clothA worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine-mesh conical sieve does the same job, and pressing the solids firmly with a ladle extracts the flavour the tammy was after.
- The cream goes in last, off the boilRe-heat the strained sauce, then stir the cream in and take it no further than steaming. Boiling after the cream is added dulls the fresh finish that the step exists to provide.
- SeasoningNo salt is mentioned in the surviving method. Season after straining, when the volume has settled — a scrape of nutmeg is traditional with this style of sauce.
- Yield and useIf a pint of milk is assumed, the finished sauce comes to something under that after boiling and with the cream added — enough for perhaps four to six servings. It is a coating sauce for poached fish, boiled fowl, eggs or vegetables, and thickens noticeably as it cools.
Sauces of this kind — milk infused with root vegetables and aromatics, then bound with flour and butter — belong to the béchamel tradition of French professional cookery, which was long established in British high-class kitchens by the nineteenth century. The distinguishing feature of the grand-kitchen version, as against the plain white sauce of domestic manuals, is exactly this infusion and the compulsory straining: the vegetables are flavouring agents that must leave no trace. The tammy-cloth, a worsted straining cloth wrung by hand, suited a well-staffed kitchen, since forcing a hot sauce through one was awkward work often needing two pairs of hands. A recipe printed as bare method under a fragment of the ingredient list, as here, probably reflects a layout in which ingredients and quantities stood in a column above the working instructions.