Home › The Belgian Kitchen › The Good Wife's Sauce
The Good Wife's Sauce
This sauce is indispensable to any one who wishes to use up slices of cold mutton. Trim your slices, take away skin and fat and pour on them the following cold sauce. Hard-boil three eggs, let them get cold. Crumble the yolks in a cup, adding slowly a tablespoonful of oil, salt, pepper, a little mustard, a teaspoonful of vinegar; then chop the whites of egg, with a scrap of onion, and if you have them, some capers. Mix all together and pour it over the cold meat.
A cold egg sauce in the gribiche family, built to make cold roast mutton worth eating again. The whole thing takes ten minutes and needs no cooking beyond the eggs.
- The hinge: add the oil slowlyThe mashed yolks are the emulsifier, and a tablespoon of oil dumped in at once will slide off them. Work it in a few drops at a time with the back of a spoon until the yolks turn glossy and thick, then loosen with the vinegar.
- Quantities are for a small dishThree yolks to one tablespoon of oil and one teaspoon of vinegar gives a stiff sauce rather than the pourable one the recipe describes. If you want it spoonable over a platter, add more oil and taste for vinegar as you go.
- "A little mustard"Read this as smooth Dijon, about half a teaspoon. It is doing structural work as well as flavouring: the mustard helps hold the oil in suspension.
- The oilIn 1915 this would most likely have meant olive oil. A neutral oil makes a blander sauce; a strong modern extra-virgin can overwhelm three yolks, so a mild olive oil is the safest choice.
- "A scrap of onion"A teaspoon of very finely chopped shallot or mild onion. Chopped coarsely it dominates; if your onion is sharp, rinse the chopped pieces in cold water and pat dry before adding.
- Capers and the whitesChop the whites to roughly caper size so the texture reads as deliberate rather than as leftover egg. Rinse salt-packed capers, drain brined ones, and hold back some of the salt until you have tasted — capers, mustard and vinegar together carry a lot of seasoning.
- Cold meat handlingCold cooked mutton or lamb should have been refrigerated promptly and used within three or four days. Trim as directed — the fat on cold mutton sets waxy and is what makes leftovers unpleasant.
- Where else it worksThe same sauce suits cold beef, poached fish, boiled potatoes or asparagus. It is best made an hour ahead so the onion and capers soften into it, and does not keep well past a day.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and its character shows everywhere: modest quantities, careful use of leftovers, and dishes that assume a household making one joint stretch across several days. This sauce belongs to the broad French and Belgian family of cold egg sauces, and is closest to sauce gribiche, built on hard-boiled yolks worked with oil rather than the raw yolks of mayonnaise, which makes it steadier and less prone to splitting. It is a domestic counterpart to restaurant cooking: no stock, no reduction, nothing that needs a fire. That it is introduced not as a sauce in its own right but as the answer to a specific problem — slices of cold mutton — says a good deal about the kitchens it came from.