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Mint Sauce
1 bunch mint 1 tablespoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons sugar 1 cup vinegar Wash mint, remove leaves, and chop; add remaining ingredients; let it stand one half hour. Serve hot or cold. 1 tablespoon butter
A straightforward uncooked mint sauce for lamb, of the English type, though the ingredient list as printed has a loose end.
- The stray butterThe "1 tablespoon butter" printed after the method looks like a stray line, possibly carried over from a neighbouring recipe in the same column. Nothing in the instructions calls for it, and it is not needed for the sauce as written; it can be ignored.
- A bunch of mintAssume a supermarket bunch of about 1 oz, which yields roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of leaves once stripped and chopped. Spearmint is the traditional choice; peppermint is too aggressive.
- The vinegar is the variableA cup of vinegar to two tablespoons of sugar is sharp by modern taste, and vinegar of the period was not standardised to today's 5 percent, so its strength varied. Start with half the vinegar, or cut it with water, and adjust sugar upward until it reads as tart rather than caustic.
- Chop, do not bruiseUse a sharp knife and cut the leaves cleanly. Mashing or pounding mint in acid turns it dark and brings out a grassy, bitter note.
- The half hour mattersThe standing time is what makes the sauce; the sugar dissolves and the mint gives up its oil to the vinegar. Longer than a couple of hours and the leaves go olive-drab, so make it the same day.
- Serving hotIf warming it, bring it only to steaming in a small non-reactive pan. Boiling drives off the mint aroma and concentrates the acid.
- YieldAbout a cup, which is generous for six to eight servings of roast lamb. It is a condiment spooned over, not a gravy.
Mint sauce with lamb is a long-standing English combination, and cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic reproduced this same skeleton of mint, vinegar and sugar through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the sharpness was understood to cut the fat of mutton, which was stronger and fattier than the lamb sold now. Its presence in a Lowney's book is a reminder that these volumes were issued by a chocolate company as full general cookbooks, not as candy pamphlets: the sauces chapter had to cover the standard repertoire a household expected, whether or not cocoa came near it. Mint was also one of the herbs most reliably found in a kitchen garden or a damp corner of the yard, and many recipes of the period begin with a bunch of it rather than a measured amount.