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Aristocratic Sauce
Mix one pound of anchovies, and about one-half teaspoonful each of cloves, mace and Jamaica ginger with one pint of juice that has been pressed from some green walnuts and permitted to settle, put them into a saucepan, and boil them until the anchovies are dissolved, strain the boiled liquor into another saucepan, add six shallots, two tablespoonfuls of soy, one breakfast cupful of vinegar, and one-half breakfast cupful of port wine. When boiled, leave the sauce until cold, then put it into bottles, and keep it corked until wanted for serving.
This is a bottled store sauce of the Worcestershire family rather than something made to order — an anchovy-and-vinegar extract meant to sit in the pantry and be spooned into other dishes. Most of the work is in sourcing the walnut juice.
- Green walnut juice is seasonalThe pint of juice comes from unripe walnuts picked while the shell inside is still soft enough to pierce with a needle, roughly late June to mid-July. They are crushed or minced with salt, left to weep, then pressed and the liquor allowed to settle and darken before use. There is no substitute that tastes the same; walnut ketchup or a good mushroom ketchup is the nearest bought stand-in.
- Jamaica gingerIn 1896 this normally meant high-grade dried ginger of Jamaican origin, though the same name was carried by an alcoholic ginger tincture sold by druggists. Half a teaspoon of ground ginger is the sensible reading here.
- AnchoviesSalt-packed whole anchovies, which is what a pound would have meant, not oil-packed fillets. Rinse off the surface salt but do not soak them; the salt is part of the preservation. A pound of salted anchovies in a quart or so of liquid makes this an aggressively salty concentrate, as intended.
- "Soy"Soy sauce, sold in bottles in America by the 1890s and a standard component of English-style store sauces. Two tablespoons of a dark naturally brewed soy is right.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup holds roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Read it as a standard cup of vinegar and half a cup of port; the proportions are forgiving.
- Dissolving the anchoviesThis is the step that decides the sauce. Simmer, stirring and pressing the fish against the pan, until they break down completely into a murky liquid; this can take twenty minutes or considerably longer. Anything undissolved will simply be caught by the strainer and thrown away, taking its flavour with it.
- StrainingStraining a second time through muslin will cut down the sediment the bottled sauce throws. Note that the shallots go in after the straining and the recipe does not say to take them out; if you want nothing solid in the bottle, add them whole or halved and lift them out before bottling.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart. The salt and vinegar do the preserving, but a corked bottle in a modern warm kitchen is not what the recipe assumed — use clean bottles with tight caps and keep it in the refrigerator. Use it by the teaspoon in gravies, chops, oyster and fish sauces, not as a table condiment on its own.
Sauces like this one are the American tail end of the English "store sauce" trade: dark, salty anchovy-and-vinegar extracts, bottled at home or bought from firms like Lea & Perrins, and used to sharpen gravies and fish dishes the way a cook now reaches for Worcestershire or fish sauce. Walnut ketchup, made from the pressed juice of green walnuts, was one of the standard English kitchen liquids of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and grand-sounding names — Aristocratic, Quin's, Camp, Harvey's — were attached to these recipes as they circulated through cookbooks, generally with no traceable originator. Oscar Tschirky, m a tre d'h tel of the Waldorf, gathered a great many such preparations into his 1896 book alongside the hotel's own dishes, which is why a homely bottling recipe of clearly English descent sits under the heading of the Waldorf kitchen.