Sauce
3 tablespoons chopped mint leaves 2 tablespoons powdered sugar 3/4 cup vinegar Have the mint very fine; mix it with the sugar; add the vinegar; stir well together and serve with roast lamb. If desired hot, heat the vinegar and sugar, and add the mint just before serving.
A straight uncooked mint sauce for lamb, of the English kind. Two things decide whether it comes out well: the sugar you read into "powdered," and how long you let it stand before serving.
- Let it standThe mint needs 20 to 30 minutes in the sweetened vinegar before it tastes of anything but vinegar. Made and served immediately, it is thin and harsh; made an hour ahead, it is a proper sauce.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period the term usually means finely granulated sugar, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Use superfine or ordinary granulated; cornstarch will cloud the sauce.
- The vinegarThree-quarters of a cup of undiluted vinegar is bracing by current taste, and vinegar strength was not standardized as it is now at 5 percent. Cider or white wine vinegar suits lamb better than distilled white, and the sauce is often let down with a few tablespoons of water or hot stock.
- Chopping the mint"Very fine" is the instruction that matters. Coarse mint sits in the vinegar without giving up flavour; chop it to near a paste, or bruise it with the sugar first, which draws out the oils.
- If served hotFollow the note exactly and add the mint off the heat. Mint boiled in vinegar turns olive-brown and loses its aroma within a minute or two.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup, enough for six to eight servings of roast lamb. It keeps a few days refrigerated, though the mint darkens.
Mint sauce with lamb is an English habit of long standing, and English cookery writers from the eighteenth century onward give versions of essentially this formula: chopped mint, sugar, vinegar, no cooking. The pairing is often explained by mint's supposed help in digesting fatty meat, though the more plausible reason is simply that sharp green herbs cut the richness of mutton, which was strong-flavoured and commonly older than the lamb sold now.