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Beyrout Sauce
Pour one tablespoonful each of chili vinegar, common vinegar and chopped onions into a saucepan, add one and one-fourth pints of melted butter, one teacupful of brown sauce and one-half teacupful each of mushroom catsup and Worcestershire sauce; stir the above ingredients over the fire until boiling, then move them to the side and let them simmer for ten minutes. Skim the sauce, place it over the fire again and boil it until thick and creamy; mix with it a sprinkling of sugar, two tablespoonfuls of anchovy sauce, and serve.
A hotel-scale sharp brown butter sauce for grilled fish and steaks, written in the shorthand a Waldorf saucier would have read without pausing. Two things need attention before you start: the quantities are for a service brigade, and "melted butter" here does not mean simply butter you have melted.
- Scale it down firstOne and one-quarter pints of butter plus a teacup of brown sauce yields something like a quart of finished sauce. Quarter the whole recipe for a domestic dinner; the proportions hold.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century professional usage this usually means the thin white roux-thickened butter sauce (flour, butter, water or stock), not clarified butter. Used literally, a pint and a quarter of pure butter will never boil down "thick and creamy" — it will just separate.
- TeacupfulPeriod sources disagree: a teacupful is variously reckoned at about 4 fl oz (a gill) and at about 6 fl oz (three-quarters of a US cup). A half teacupful is therefore somewhere between 2 and 3 fl oz. Start at the lower end and adjust.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or a well-reduced demi-glace, not the bottled brown table sauce sold under that name in Britain today. A concentrated veal or beef jus will stand in.
- Chili vinegarVinegar steeped with hot red chillies, a standard Victorian store-cupboard item. Cider or white wine vinegar with a pinch of cayenne or a dash of a vinegar-based hot sauce covers it.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, black, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, nothing like tomato ketchup. Still sold by British specialists; a spoonful of mushroom soy plus a little Worcestershire is the nearest common substitute.
- Anchovy sauce goes in last, off the boilAnchovy sauce goes in last -- The recipe adds it, with the sugar, only after the sauce has boiled thick; it does not say to take the pan off the heat, though stirring it in at the end rather than boiling it long is the sensible reading. Taste before deciding how much sugar you want.
- SaltAnchovy, Worcestershire, mushroom catsup and reduced brown sauce are all salty. Season nothing until the very last taste.
- ServingA quartered batch gives roughly a cupful, enough for several servings as a spooned sauce. The recipe itself names no dish and gives no yield. It reheats gently but will split if boiled again.
Sauces named for cities were a mannerism of the grand-hotel kitchen, and Beyrout — an older Anglicised transliteration of Beirut — belongs to a family of piquant brown sauces of the late nineteenth century that gestured vaguely eastward without containing anything from the place named. What it actually is, is thoroughly Anglo-French: brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, deepened with mushroom catsup, and finished with anchovy and Worcestershire, the same bottled condiments that were widely available in England from the 1830s. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and compiled this book in 1896, was collecting the working repertoire of his kitchen rather than inventing dishes, and the recipe reads exactly like a note copied from a saucier's book — no yield, no timing beyond the ten-minute simmer, and quantities that assume a stockpot rather than a household pan.