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Poor Man's Sauce
Even a piece of meat of poor quality is much liked if it has the following sauce poured over it when served. Put a little milk, say a cupful, in a saucepan, with salt and pepper; let it heat. Chop up a handful of shallots and a quarter as much of parsley that is well washed. Throw them into the milk; let it boil, and when the shallots are tender the sauce is ready. If you have no milk, use water; but in that case let it be strongly flavored with vinegar.
A three-ingredient pan sauce built to carry cheap meat. The whole thing takes about as long as it takes the shallots to soften.
- QuantitiesA cupful of milk, a handful of chopped shallots (roughly 3-4 medium, about 1/2 cup) and a quarter as much parsley by volume (2 tablespoons). This yields enough for two to three servings poured over sliced meat.
- Keep it below a boilThe instruction to "let it boil" can scorch milk in a thin modern pan and drive it up the sides. Hold it at a bare simmer and stir; the recipe gives no timing, but chopped shallots should be tender in roughly 5-10 minutes.
- The vinegar variant is a different sauceMilk and a strong dose of vinegar will curdle, so treat the water-and-vinegar version as the alternative it is meant to be, not an addition. Start with a tablespoon of wine vinegar to a cup of water and taste.
- It stays thinThere is no flour or butter here, so expect a loose, brothy sauce rather than a coating one. If you want body, reduce it by a third before serving, or finish off the heat with a knob of butter.
- Shallots, not scallionsBelgian and French usage here means the small brown-skinned bulb allium. Onion will substitute but is sweeter and coarser; the point of shallot is that it goes soft and mild quickly.
- Season at the endSalt goes in at the start in the original, but reduction concentrates it. Check again once the shallots are done, and be generous with pepper, which is doing most of the work.
- ServingThe recipe specifies only "a piece of meat of poor quality"; boiled or braised beef, or cold roast reheated in the sauce, would suit. The original says to pour it over the meat when serving.
Poor man's sauce is an old French and Belgian family preparation, generally described in nineteenth-century cookery as shallots and parsley moistened with broth or vinegar and sometimes thickened with breadcrumbs, its purpose being to make plain boiled beef or the previous day's roast worth eating again. The milk version given here is the frugal domestic form, needing no butter, stock or flour. The Belgian Cook Book (1915) was assembled from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees in England during the First World War, and its character shows throughout - the frankness of an opening line about meat of poor quality belongs to a book written by people cooking in displacement rather than by a professional chef.