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Cardinal Fish Sauce
Mix together one pint of vinegar, one gill of port wine, one tablespoonful of anchovy liquor, one dessert spoonful of walnut catsup, one-fourth ounce of cayenne, two drams of cochineal and three cloves of garlic. Let it stand for four days, giving it about six good stirrings during that time. Strain it through a flannel bag, and put it in small bottles.
Chef Sauce for Steaks, Etc Peel six shallots, cut them into halves, put them in a wide-mouthed bottle, with one-half ounce of cayenne pepper, and four tablespoonfuls of soy; pour in one breakfast cupful of mushroom catsup, shake the contents of the bottle well, and fill it up with the best vinegar. Shake the bottle occasionally for two days, then leave it untouched for four days longer. Pour off one-half pint of the sauce into a smaller bottle, which keep corked for present use; fill up the larger bottle again with more vinegar, cork it tightly, and leave it for about a month before using the sauce.
Two cold-steeped bottled sauces of the old English table type — no cooking, just maceration in vinegar and straining. Both are condiments to be used by the spoonful, not poured.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons. Two drams is about 3.5 g if avoirdupois drams are meant, nearer 7.8 g if apothecaries'; a "breakfast cupful" is roughly 8-10 fl oz. A quarter ounce of cayenne is about a tablespoon and a half of ground pepper — this is a deliberately fierce sauce, meant to be dosed a few drops at a time.
- The hinge: acidity does the preservingNothing here is heated, so the vinegar is the only thing keeping the garlic and anchovy liquor safe. Use full-strength commercial vinegar (5 percent acidity) and do not dilute it with water or extra wine. Garlic held in oil or in weak acid is a botulism risk; garlic in straight vinegar, strained out after four days, is not.
- CochinealPowdered dried cochineal insects, sold in the period as a red colouring; today the same pigment is sold as carmine or E120. It is purely cosmetic here and can be left out. It is a known allergen for a small number of people, and it is not vegetarian.
- Anchovy liquorThe salty brine from a barrel or tin of salted anchovies. Drain the oil or brine from tinned anchovies, or substitute a tablespoon of Asian fish sauce.
- Walnut and mushroom catsupNeither is tomato-based. Walnut catsup is a black, salty steep of green walnuts; mushroom catsup a similar liquor drawn from salted mushrooms. Both are still made in Britain and sold online. Mushroom catsup can be approximated with a strong mushroom-soy blend, walnut catsup less easily — a dark Worcestershire is the nearest common thing.
- "Soy"Here this means soy sauce, an imported condiment. Use a dark, naturally brewed soy.
- StrainingA flannel bag is a fine-woven cloth filter; a double layer of butter muslin or a coffee filter does the same job. Expect the cayenne sediment to clog it — strain slowly and do not squeeze, or the sauce goes cloudy.
- Yield and keepingThe first sauce makes a little over a pint; the second makes as much as the wide-mouthed bottle holds, since the recipe gives no total volume. Both keep for months refrigerated, and the second is designed as a perpetual bottle — draw off what you need and replace with vinegar. Refrigerate rather than leaving them on a shelf, since neither has the salt load of a commercial sauce.
Bottled store sauces of this kind were a staple of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery: vinegar, cayenne, an anchovy or mushroom element, and time. They belong to the same family of English kitchen preparations that produced Worcestershire, and English cookbooks from Mrs. Rundell onward carry many of them under names such as Quin's sauce and camp sauce; the name "cardinal" is conventionally explained as the red of a cardinal's robes, which is what the cochineal supplies. Oscar Tschirky printed them in the Waldorf's book in 1896, when the fashionable dining rooms ran on French method while the bottled sauces on the table remained English. The "perpetual" second bottle, refilled with vinegar and left a month, reads as a household economy.