Reading Sauce
3/4 pint of Indian soy. 1/2 oz. of bruised ginger. 1/2 oz. of long pepper. INGREDIENTS.- 2½ pints of walnut pickle, 1½ oz. of shalots, 1 quart of spring water, pint of Indian soy, oz. of bruised ginger, oz. of long pepper, 1 oz. of mustard-seed, 1 anchovy, leaves. oz. of cayenne, 1/4 oz. of dried sweet bay- Bruise the shalots in a mortar, and put them in a stone jar with the walnut-liquor; place it before the fire, and let it boil until reduced to 2 pints. Then, into another jar, put all the ingredients except the bayleaves, taking care that they are well bruised, so that the flavour may be thoroughly extracted; put this also before the fire, and let it boil for 1 hour or rather more. When the contents of both jars are sufficiently cooked, mix them together, stirring them well as you mix them, and submit them to a slow boiling for 1/2 hour; cover closely, and let them stand 24 hours in a cool place; then open the jar and add the bay-leaves; let it stand a week longer closed down, when strain through a flannel bag, and it will be ready for use. The above quantities will make 1/2 gallon. 1/2 oz. of cayenne. 1/4 oz. of dried sweet bay-leaves.
TIME.-Altogether, 3 hours.
SEASONABLE. -This sauce may be made at any time.
A homemade version of a Victorian bottled table sauce: a spiced, salty, near-black liquid in the Worcestershire family, meant for beef, chops and fish rather than eaten by the spoon. Two things matter most — the walnut liquor must be reduced by roughly a third before anything else happens, and the bay leaves go in only after the first long standing, so their flavour stays fresh rather than boiled out.
- The quantities are damagedSeveral fractions have dropped out of this text: "pint of Indian soy", "oz. of bruised ginger", "oz. of long pepper" and "oz. of cayenne" all originally carried a fraction, and the bay leaves and cayenne lines have been scrambled together. Do not guess at the cayenne in particular; a quarter-ounce and a full ounce are very different sauces. Treat the proportions as indicative and season by taste.
- Walnut pickleThis means the spiced vinegar liquor drained from a jar of pickled green walnuts, not the walnuts themselves. Bottled pickled walnuts are still sold in Britain and their liquor works; failing that, a dark malt-vinegar pickling liquor with cloves and allspice is the nearest substitute, though the flavour will be thinner.
- Indian soyNineteenth-century "soy" is soy sauce, imported and generally thicker and saltier than a modern Japanese brand. A dark Chinese soy is closer in character than a light one.
- Long pepperPiper longum, a relative of black pepper with a hotter, sweeter, slightly numbing finish. It is sold whole by spice merchants; black peppercorns will stand in at about the same weight, with some loss of the characteristic warmth.
- Shalots and bruising"Shalots" are shallots. The repeated instruction to bruise the shalots in a mortar and to see that the spices "are well bruised, so that the flavour may be thoroughly extracted" is the recipe's own explanation: broken spice gives up more to the hot liquor than whole spice does.
- Before the fire, in a stone jarThe stoneware jar stood at the hearth, where it could be kept boiling steadily for hours without catching. A heavy non-reactive saucepan on a low burner does the same; the sauce is acidic, so avoid bare aluminium or cast iron.
- StrainingA flannel bag is a jelly bag. Two layers of dampened muslin in a sieve will do. Let it drip rather than squeezing, or the sauce turns cloudy.
- Yield and keepingHalf a gallon is four imperial pints, roughly 2.3 litres — a great deal of table sauce. Quartering the recipe is sensible. Bottle in scalded, dry bottles, and although the salt and vinegar are strongly preservative, keep opened bottles in the refrigerator and discard any that ferment, cloud or smell yeasty.
- ServingUse it as you would Worcestershire sauce: a few dashes over grilled or roast meat, into gravies, or stirred into a beef stew at the end.
Reading sauce takes its name from the Berkshire town, and is generally traced to the firm of Charles Cocks & Co. of Reading, whose bottled "Cocks's Reading Sauce" was widely advertised in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as a rival to Lea & Perrins' Worcestershire. Beeton's book carries a number of these copyist recipes — Harvey's sauce, Mushroom ketchup, Reading sauce — because bottled proprietary condiments were both fashionable and, for a middle-class household counting shillings, expensive relative to a stone jar sat by the hearth for a fortnight. All of them belong to the same family: a dark, salty, long-keeping liquid built on anchovy, soy, vinegar or walnut liquor and a heavy hand of bruised spice, descended in spirit from the fermented fish sauces English cooks encountered through the East India trade. The reliance on the fireside for slow heat is the period detail worth noticing; for most households a steady three-hour simmer was the fire's work rather than a burner's.