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Plain Cookery (Take pounds of the scrag-end)
Take 3 pounds of the scrag-end of a neck of very fresh mutton, cut it into several pieces, wash them in cold water, and put them into a stewpan with 2 quarts of cold spring-water; place the stewpan on the fire to boil, skim it well, and then add a couple of turnips cut into slices, a few branches of parsley, a sprig of green thyme, and a little salt. When it has boiled gently by the side of the stove for an hour and a half, skim off the fat from the surface, and then let it be strained through a lawn sieve into a basin and kept for use.
Drawn Butter.
Half pint of boiling water, 2 teaspoonsful of flour, and 2 ounces of butter. Mix the flour and butter together until they are perfectly smooth.
Stir this into the boiling water, and add salt to taste. If made with milk in place of water, less butter will answer.
Common Sauce.
Soak slices of veal, ham, onions, parsnips, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 heads of cloves, then add broth, a glass of white wine, and 2 slices of lemon; simmer it over a slow fire, skim it well, and sift it. Miser's Sauce.
Chop 5 or 6 large onions, mix a little verjuice, or vinegar, pepper, salt, and a little butter; serve it up either warm or cold.
Parson's Sauce.
Chop lemon-peel very fine, with 2 or 3 pickled eucumbers, a bit of butter, salt, and coarse pepper; a little flour, with 2 spoonsful of catsup, and stew it on the fire without boiling.
Nonpareil Sauce.
Take a slice of boiled ham, as much breast of roasted fowl, a pickled cucumber, a hard yolk of an egg, one anchovy, a little parsley, and a head of shallot, chopped very fine; boil it a moment in good catsup, and use it for meat or fish.
Nivernoise Sauce.
Put in a small stewpan a couple of slices of ham, a clove of garlic, 2 cloves, a laurel-leaf, sliced onions, and roots; let it catch the fire a little. Then add a small quantity of broth, 2 spoonsful of catsup, and a spoonful of the best vinegar. Simmer it for an hour on the side of the stove, then sift it in a sieve, and serve it for a highflavored sauce. Gravy Cakes.
Chop 2 legs of beef in pieces, put them into a pot of water, stew it over a slow fire a day and a night; then add onions, herbs, and spices as for gravy; continue stewing it till the meat is off the bones, and the gravy quite out; then strain the liquor into a milk-pan, to which quantity it should be reduced; when cold, take off the fat, put it into a saucepan, and add whatever is required to flavor it; simmer it on a slow fire till reduced to about 12 saucers two-thirds full, put them in an airy place till as dry as leather, put them in paper bags, and keep in a dry place.
Sailor's Sauce.
Chop a fowl's liver with 2 or 3 shallots, and a couple of truffles or mushrooms; simmer these in a spoonful of oil, 2 or 3 spoonsful of gravy, a glass of wine, a little salt and coarse pepper; simmer it about half an hour, and skim it very well before using.
Queen's Sauce.
Simmer crumbs of bread in good gravy, until it is quite thick, take it off the fire, and add a few sweet almonds pounded, 2 hard yolks of eggs, and a breast of fowl roasted, all pounded very fine; boil a sufficient quantity of cream to your sauce, and sift all together, then add pepper and salt; and warm it without boiling.
Tomato Catsup.
Boil tomatoes, full ripe, in their juice, to nearly the consistence of a pulp, pass them through a hair sieve, and add salt to the taste. Aromatize it sufficiently with clove, pepper, and nutmegs.
Catsup for Sea-stores.
Take a gallon of strong stale beer, a pound of anchovies washed from the pickle, the same of shallots peeled; 1/2 an ounce of mace, 1/2 an ounce of cloves, 4 of an ounce of whole pepper, 3 or 4 large races of ginger, and 2 quarts of large mushroom flaps, rubbed to pieces. Cover these close, and let it simmer till half wasted. Then strain it through a flannel bag; let it stand till quite cold, and then bottle it. This may be carried to any part of the world; and a spoonful of it to a pound of fresh butter melted, will make a fine fish sauce, or will supply the place of gravy sauce. The stronger and staler the beer the better will be the catsup.
This is a run of separate items — a mutton broth, eight sauces, and two keeping preserves — printed as one block. The broth and the sauces are straightforward cooking; the two preserves at the end (Tomato Catsup and Gravy Cakes, and to a lesser degree the Catsup for Sea-stores) are shelf-storage instructions that no longer meet any safe standard, and they are the reason for the caution above.
- Why the preserves failThe tomato catsup is boiled pulp with salt and spice only o v, no measured acid, no processing time d no acid is added before it is put by. Unacidified tomato pulp held sealed at room temperature is the kind of low-oxygen, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin, and the acidity of tomatoes varies enough that it cannot be assumed safe. Use a current tested recipe if you want bottled ketchup.
- Gravy CakesA meat extract simmered "a day and a night," poured into saucers and left in an airy place "till as dry as leather" is uncontrolled drying of a protein-rich food at ambient temperature over days, with no barrier of salt, acid or sugar. Bacterial and mould growth during the slow dry are real risks, and the dryness is never verified. Commercial stock concentrate is the descendant of this and is the thing to buy.
- Catsup for Sea-storesBeer, anchovies, shallots and mushrooms simmered down and bottled cold was genuinely carried on ships, but it relies on stale beer of unknown acidity and salt fish of unknown salt content — neither quantified here — to hold for months. It is not a controlled preserve by any measure we can check.
- The mutton brothScrag end is the bony top of the neck; ask for neck bones or neck slices, about 3 lb. Two quarts of cold water and a gentle hour and a half reduce to roughly a scant 1.5 quarts of clear broth, enough for four to six as a first course. Skimming twice, as directed, is what keeps it clear.
- Drawn butterTwo teaspoons of flour to half a pint of water gives a very thin sauce by modern habit; it is meant to be a barely bound melted butter, not a velouté. Work the flour into the soft butter first, as written, or it will lump when it hits the boiling water.
- "Catsup" hereWhere the sauces call for "catsup" or "good catsup" they mean mushroom or walnut catsup — a dark, salty, thin condiment closer to Worcestershire sauce than to tomato ketchup. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; tomato ketchup will throw the sauces sweet and pink.
- Vanished ingredients and termsVerjuice is the juice of unripe grapes or crab apples, sharp but softer than vinegar; a lawn sieve is a very fine cloth-lined strainer, for which muslin in a colander stands in. A laurel-leaf is a bay leaf. A "race" of ginger is a whole fresh rhizome, roughly a thumb. "4 of an ounce of whole pepper" is almost certainly a misprint for a quarter ounce.
- "Let it catch the fire a little"In Nivernoise Sauce this means let the ham, onions and roots begin to brown and stick before the broth goes in — the colour and the fond are the whole point of the sauce. In Common Sauce, "soak" is doing the same job of sweating the meat and vegetables in the pan; the original is genuinely vague there.
- Sauces to warm, not boilQueen's Sauce is thickened with pounded egg yolk, almonds and cream and is explicitly to be warmed without boiling — it will curdle and go grainy if it simmers. The same restraint applies to Parson's Sauce, where the catsup and butter are only to be stewed together.
History: This page reads as a compilation rather than a single author's composition, and it shows the seams: an English broth of neck of mutton sits beside a set of sauces whose names look half-translated from French practice — Nivernoise after the Nivernais, Miser's and Parson's for the cheap onion and pickle sauces a thrifty household could raise from a larder without stock. "Catsup" in this period still means a dark, keeping liquid seasoning, usually of mushrooms, walnuts or anchovies; the word is usually traced to Malay kecap and behind that to Chinese fermented fish and soy sauces, though the route is not settled. The Catsup for Sea-stores here is of exactly that type — built to survive a voyage and to stand in for gravy where no gravy could be had — and tomato catsup, printed alongside it, was the newer arrival in the family. The Gravy Cakes are a household forerunner of the bouillon cube: reducing stock to a leathery tablet was one of the few ways to carry meat flavour before Liebig's meat extract was commercialised in the 1860s.