Garlic Vinegar
INGREDIENTS. - 2 oz. of garlic, 1 quart of wine vinegar.
Chop the garlic finely, and weigh it, then put it in the above proportion to the vinegar, which must be boiled and allowed to get cold. Infuse for a fortnight, strain and bottle.
TIME.-14 days.
Genevese Sauce (for Salmon, Trout, &c.)-INGREDIENTS sufficient for a salmon.-1 small carrot, a small faggot of sweet herbs, including parsley, 1 onion, 5 or 6 mushrooms (when obtainable), 1 bayleaf, 6 cloves, 1 blade of mace, 2 oz. of butter, 1 glass of sherry, 1½ pint of white stock, thickening of butter and flour, the juice of half a lemon. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Cut up the onion and the carrot into small rings, and put them into a stewpan with the herbs, mushrooms, bay-leaf, cloves and mace; add the butter, and simmer the whole very gently over a slow GERMAN SAUCE. fire until the onion is quite tender. Pour in the stock and sherry, and stew slowly for 1 hour, when strain it off into a clean saucepan. Now make a thickening of butter and flour, put it to the sauce, stir it over the fire until perfectly smooth and mellow, add the lemon-juice, give one boil, when it will be ready for table.
TIME.-Altogether 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two recipes have run together here through a printing overlap: a garlic vinegar, and the start of a Genevese sauce for salmon. Both are workable, but read them as separate items.
- The proportion is the point2 oz of peeled, finely chopped garlic to 1 quart (an imperial quart, about 1.1 litres) of wine vinegar -- perhaps a dozen to twenty average cloves, depending on size. Weigh after chopping, as Beeton says; whole-head weights vary wildly.
- Boil and cool firstThe vinegar is boiled and brought back to room temperature before the garlic goes in. Hot vinegar poured over raw garlic cooks it and gives a flat, stewed flavour rather than the sharp raw note that makes this useful.
- Keep it acidic and coveredGarlic held in oil is a botulism risk; garlic held in full-strength vinegar is not, because the pH is far below the level at which the organism can grow. Use vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity, keep the garlic fully submerged, and do not dilute it.
- Fortnight in a cool dark placeFourteen days at room temperature in a sealed jar, out of sunlight. Strain through muslin, bottle, and refrigerate. The recipe gives no guidance on how long the bottled vinegar keeps.
- Genevese sauce: a faggot of herbsA faggot is a bundle tied with string — parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf are the usual makeup. It is lifted out or strained off, so tying is only for convenience.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single piece of the dried aril of nutmeg; as a substitute, roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace is the usual rule of thumb. Its flavour is lighter and more delicate than nutmeg's.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and unreduced. Any good low-salt chicken stock stands in; avoid anything browned, which will muddy the colour.
- Thickening of butter and flourUsually read as equal weights kneaded raw, beurre manié, whisked into the strained liquid in small pieces. Something in the region of 1 to 1½ oz of each may be needed to bring the strained liquid to a coating consistency; add it in pieces and judge by eye. Give it the single boil Beeton asks for to cook out the flour.
- YieldThe vinegar makes a quart. Beeton gives the sauce as sufficient for a salmon; after an hour's stewing and straining it will come to somewhat less than the 1½ pints of stock started with.
Flavoured vinegars were a standing item in the Victorian storeroom, and Beeton's book gives a whole file of them — tarragon, chilli, cucumber, camp — because vinegar was one of the few reliable ways to keep a summer flavour into winter without sugar or ice. Garlic vinegar in particular was a discreet way to get garlic into English cooking at a time when the bulb itself was widely distrusted as coarse and foreign; a spoonful in a salad dressing or a sauce gave the flavour without anyone finding a piece of it on the plate. The Genevese sauce that follows is a reminder of how French the English fish course had become by the 1860s: it is a classic wine-and-stock reduction thickened at the last moment, and it was served with poached salmon.