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Mint Sauce for Roast Lamb
1/2 cup chopped fresh mint. 1/2 cup vinegar. 2 tablespoons sugar. Pour vinegar over sugar. When dissolved add mint. Set in warm place and before serving add warm water if too strong with vinegar.
Mix all together, serve on cutlets. Good with fish.
An uncooked sauce that needs nothing but time and a decent vinegar. The one thing that matters is letting it stand long enough for the mint to bleed into the syrup.
- Standing time"Set in warm place" suggests a spot near the stove rather than on it. The recipe gives no time, but a short stand of half an hour or so lets the mint infuse; strong heat is best avoided, as it dulls the mint.
- The vinegarMalt vinegar was the usual choice for mint sauce in British kitchens; cider vinegar was common in American ones and is milder. Either will do, and if your vinegar tastes sharp the recipe already allows for dilution with warm water.
- Chopping the mintChop by hand with a sharp knife rather than in a processor — bruised mint tastes muddy. Spearmint is the traditional choice, not peppermint.
- SugarTwo tablespoons to half a cup of vinegar makes a restrained, fairly sour sauce. Granulated sugar dissolves faster if the vinegar is warmed first, though the recipe simply pours it over the sugar as it comes.
- YieldRoughly a cup, enough for four to six servings. It is spooned over the meat at the table, a tablespoon or so per plate, not poured like a gravy.
- KeepingThe acid and sugar preserve it for several days refrigerated, though the mint darkens and the fresh top note fades after a day. Make it the same day if you can.
- "Good with fish"Mrs. Wilson's aside makes more sense with oily fish — mackerel, bluefish — where the vinegar cuts richness, than with delicate white fish.
Mint sauce is the English accompaniment to lamb, generally traced in printed cookery to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when sharp herb-and-vinegar sauces were standard partners to roast meat across the board — often said to be a survival of the medieval taste for sour sauces that mostly died out elsewhere. That it survived with lamb in particular is often attributed to the vinegar's usefulness against the fattiness of mutton. Mrs. Wilson published this in the years around the First World War, when she was food editor for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and much occupied with thrift; a sauce made from a handful of garden mint, cheap vinegar and two spoonfuls of sugar fits that programme exactly.