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Mint Sauce
1/4 cup finely chopped mint leaves ½ cup vinegar 1 tablespoon powdered sugar Add sugar to vinegar; when dissolved, pour over mint and let stand thirty minutes on back of range to infuse. If vinegar is very strong, dilute with water.
A cold-infused mint vinegar for roast lamb, and about as simple as a sauce gets — the only real variables are the strength of the vinegar and how long you let it sit.
- The vinegar quantityThe printed page was checked: the sauce takes half a cup of vinegar to a quarter cup of mint and a tablespoon of sugar. If your vinegar is sharp, dilute it with a little water as directed.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn American books of this period powdered sugar means finely granulated sugar, ground fine but with no cornstarch in it. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the right substitute; confectioners' sugar will cloud the vinegar.
- "Back of range" means warm, not hotThe rear of a coal range was the cooler end of the surface, used for gentle warming rather than cooking. The point is a warm infusion. Set the bowl somewhere warm, or simply leave it on the counter and give it longer.
- Do not let it boil or reduceHeat drives off the volatile oils that make mint taste of mint, and turns the leaves black and hay-like. If the vinegar is warmed at all, take it off the heat before adding the mint.
- Diluting the vinegarThe caution is worth heeding: vinegar strength was not standardised in this period and varied a good deal from barrel to barrel, so cooks were expected to judge by taste. Taste first; most modern vinegar needs no water, though a tablespoon or two softens the edge.
- Choice of vinegarMalt vinegar is the traditional British pairing with lamb and gives the sauce its familiar sharpness. Cider vinegar is milder and closer to what a New England kitchen of 1896 would have had on hand.
- Chop, do not bruise to pasteA sharp knife and a dry board. Mint pounded in a mortar muddies the sauce; you want distinct green flecks suspended in the vinegar.
- Yield and servingYield depends on which vinegar quantity you follow: roughly three-quarters of a cup with 1/2 cup vinegar, closer to a pint and a half's worth as printed. Serve at room temperature in a small pitcher or sauceboat; it keeps a few days refrigerated, though the color dulls after the first day.
Mint sauce with lamb is an English convention that the American cooking schools inherited whole — Fannie Farmer files it among the fish and meat sauces without comment, assuming any reader would know what it was for. Vinegar-and-herb sauces for meat run back through medieval European cookery, where acid was expected alongside roast flesh, and mint in particular is generally traced to the English table by the seventeenth century; John Evelyn was already writing about mint as a salad and sauce herb in that period. What makes this version a product of its moment is the range itself: the instruction to leave the bowl "on back of range" only makes sense in a kitchen with a coal or wood stove whose surface held a permanent gradient of heat, from searing at the firebox to merely warm at the rear. It is a piece of equipment vocabulary that belongs to that kind of kitchen.