Camp Vinegar
INGREDIENTS.- 1 head of garlic, ½ oz. of cayenne, 2 teaspoonfuls of soy, 2 ditto walnut ketchup, 1 pint of vinegar, cochineal to colour. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Slice the garlic, and put it, with all the above ingredients, into a clean bottle. Let it stand to infuse for a month, when strain it off quite clear, and it will be fit for use.
Keep it in small bottles well sealed to exclude the air. Canapés, Anchovy. - INGREDIENTS for 12 canapés. -2 slices of stale bread, 6 anchovies, 2 eggs, butter or clarified dripping, for frying. AVERAGE COST, 9d. Cut the bread one-third of an inch thick and stamp it out in little rounds. Fry them till of a bright golden brown. Boil the eggs hard, and wash, bone and fillet the anchovies. Curl two fillets in each round of bread, and fill the centre with chopped white of egg and the yellow rubbed through a sieve.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Procure a calf's liver as white as possible, and cut it into slices of a good and equal shape. Dip them in flour, and fry them of a good colour in a little butter.
When they are done, put them on a dish, which keep hot before the fire. Mince the herbs very fine, put them in the frying-pan with a little more butter; add the remain-pepper, a few capers. AVERAGE COST, 10d. ing ingredients, simmer gently until the herbs are done, and pour over the liver.
Canapés, Lobster. - INGREDIENTS for 12 canapés.-12 croûtons, prepared as in preceding recipe, a little lobster butter, the tail of a small lobster, oil, vinegar and Cut small slices of the lobster, and soak them for a few minutes in oil and CANAPÉS, SAVOURY. vinegar. Spread the croûtons with the butter, lay a slice on each, and two or three layers on the top, add a slight seasoning of pepper, and serve on a stamped paper garnished with parsley or watercress.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Canapés, Savoury. - INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 6 persons.-6 oysters, 3 anchovies, 1 sardine, a few shrimps, a small head of celery, 1 small shalot, a little cress, mayonnaise sauce, some tarragon, montpelier butter, 1 hard-boiled egg, lobster coral, aspic jelly. AVERAGE COST, 28.
Pound the shalot, shred the celery, bone and scale the fish, and mix, with the cress and tarragon, chopped finely. Fill small brioche cases with the mixture, and run a little butter round the edges, strew some chopped hard-boiled egg and lobster coral on the top of each, and garnish with some aspic jelly, roughed with a fork, and some fresh parsley.
SEASONABLE in autumn and winter, as a savoury at dinner.
Canary Pudding. (Very good.)- INGREDIENTS for pudding, sufficient for 5 persons. The weight of 3 eggs in sugar and butter, the weight of 2 eggs in flour, the rind of 1 small lemon, 3 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Melt the butter to a liquid state, but do not allow it to oil; stir to this the sugar and finely-minced lemon-peel, and gradually dredge in the flour, keeping the mixture well stirred; whisk the eggs; add these to the pudding; beat all the ingredients until thoroughly blended, and put them into a buttered mould or basin; boil for 2 hours, and serve with sweet sauce.
TIME. -2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A pungent bottled seasoning of the sort Victorian households kept beside the cruet: garlic, cayenne, soy and walnut ketchup steeped in vinegar for a month, then strained and rebottled. The work is trivial; the waiting is the recipe.
- The cayenne quantityThe printed figure for the cayenne is unreliable and should not be trusted as it stands. Half an ounce of cayenne to a pint of vinegar is already fierce but plausible for a condiment used by the teaspoon; start well below that if you are unsure, since you cannot take heat back out.
- Soy and walnut ketchup"Soy" here means soy sauce, then sold ready-made as a dark, salty bottled sauce. Walnut ketchup is a thin, black, spiced condiment made from green walnuts; a commercial version is still sold in Britain, and mushroom ketchup or a dash of Worcestershire sauce stands in tolerably if you cannot find it.
- CochinealCochineal is a red dye made from scale insects, sold in Victorian kitchens as a liquid or as prepared grains. It contributes nothing but colour and can simply be left out; if you want the red tint, modern cochineal or carmine extract is sold as a food colouring.
- The vinegarUse a good malt or cider vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity. That acidity is what makes a month-long unrefrigerated garlic steeping safe here, and it is why the vinegar should not be diluted.
- Vessel and infusionA clean glass bottle or jar with a non-corroding lid; vinegar will eat bare metal. Keep it in a cool dark cupboard for the month and turn or shake it every few days.
- Straining and storingStrain through muslin or a coffee filter until the liquid runs clear; suspended solids are one reason a long-kept bottled vinegar goes cloudy. Fill small bottles to the neck and seal well, as the recipe says, to keep air off.
- Yield and useAbout a pint, which is a great deal of a condiment used a few drops at a time. Bottled seasonings of this kind were generally reached for with gravies, hashes, chops and cold meat, though this recipe gives no directions for serving.
"Camp" sauces and vinegars belong to a family of concentrated bottled seasonings that took hold in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the name is often said to come from officers, travellers and colonial households wanting something portable that would lift plain cooked meat wherever they happened to be eating it, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Walnut and mushroom ketchups, soy imported through the East India trade, anchovy essence and cayenne were the standard building blocks, and recipes for combining them varied from writer to writer. Mrs Beeton's version is squarely in that line, and the touch of cochineal is characteristic of a period that expected a bottled sauce to look as emphatic as it tasted.