Mint Sauce
3 tablespoonfuls vinegar. 2 tablespoonfuls mint. 1 tablespoonful powdered sugar. 1 saltspoonful salt.
Mix ten minutes before using.--Mrs. S. T.
Sauces especially suitable for Fowls, though they may be used for any kind of Meats.
A three-ingredient uncooked sauce that depends entirely on the mint being cut fine and the sugar being fully dissolved. Everything else is proportion.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon. At that ratio the salt is a seasoning, not a preservative; the sauce is meant to be mixed shortly before serving rather than stored.
- "2 tablespoonfuls mint"Presumably mint already chopped and spooned up loosely; the recipe does not specify. Spearmint is the traditional choice for mint sauce; peppermint is more aggressive.
- Chop, don't bruiseCut the leaves fine with a sharp knife, or crush them with the sugar in a mortar; the sugar acts as an abrasive and helps draw the oils out of the leaf. The recipe itself says only to mix.
- The vinegarCider vinegar or white wine vinegar at about 5 percent acidity. Straight distilled white vinegar is harsh at this concentration and will flatten the mint. Some cooks cut it with a spoonful of hot water to help the sugar dissolve.
- Ten minutes is a minimumThe instruction to mix ten minutes ahead is the least you can get away with. Twenty to thirty minutes at room temperature gives a noticeably rounder sauce, and the color settles from bright green to olive.
- Powdered sugarIn 1879 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Use superfine or ordinary granulated sugar.
- YieldAbout six tablespoons of mixture, roughly a third of a cup — enough for two or three plates. Scale up freely; the proportions hold.
- ServingThe book offers it for fowl, but this is the standard English sauce for roast lamb and mutton, where the acid cuts the fat. Serve it cool, spooned over the meat at the table rather than cooked with it.
Mint sauce of vinegar, sugar and chopped mint is an English table sauce of long standing, generally traced to the eighteenth century and firmly attached to roast lamb by the Victorian period; its logic is the same as that of any sharp fruit or herb accompaniment to fatty meat. What is notable here is the heading, which offers it for fowl and "any kind of Meats" — a broader application than the lamb-only convention that later hardened. Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited to named Virginia housekeepers, and the initials "Mrs. S. T." mark this as one of those credited contributions.