Home › Sauces for Fish, Meat, Poultry and Game › Mint Sauce
Mint Sauce
1 tablespoon powdered sugar ¼ cup finely chopped mint ½ cup vinegar leaves
Dissolve sugar in vinegar. Pour this over finely chopped mint leaves and stand for one-half hour on back of a stove to infuse. If vinegar is very strong, dilute with water.
A three-ingredient infusion whose only real variable is the vinegar. The column layout of the original has scrambled the ingredient list slightly: it reads as 1 tablespoon powdered sugar, 1/4 cup finely chopped mint leaves, and 1/2 cup vinegar.
- Vinegar strength is the hingeHousehold vinegar of the period was often homemade or drawn from a barrel and varied in strength from batch to batch, which is why the recipe ends with the instruction to dilute. Taste before diluting; with modern 5% vinegar you will usually want it at full strength, or cut by no more than a quarter.
- "Back of a stove"On a coal or wood range the back was the coolest zone, gently warm rather than hot. The point is warmth to draw out the mint oils, not cooking. A saucepan on the lowest burner setting, or a jar set in a bowl of hot tap water, does the same thing.
- Do not let it boilHeat above a bare simmer turns the mint dull olive and drives off the volatile oils that make the sauce worth having. If steam is rising, it is too hot.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally meant sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or ordinary granulated is the closer match; it dissolves readily in vinegar without any help.
- Chopping the mintChop by hand with a sharp knife rather than in a processor, which bruises the leaves and brings out bitterness. Spearmint is the traditional choice; peppermint is too aggressive here.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly three-quarters of a cup, enough for several servings. Serve at room temperature alongside roast lamb, spooned over rather than stirred in. It keeps a few days refrigerated, though the mint darkens.
Mint sauce with lamb is a firmly British pairing, and its appearance in an American household manual of the early twentieth century reflects how much of that tradition the domestic-science writers carried over intact. The formula is essentially a sweetened herb vinegar, a preparation older than the specific lamb association: cooks had been steeping herbs in vinegar for sauces and condiments for centuries before anyone codified this particular combination. The instruction to dilute strong vinegar is a reminder that vinegar was often homemade or bought in bulk from a barrel, with no standardized acidity printed on the label. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this and similar volumes as part of a broad turn-of-the-century business in guidance for the household.