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Gherkin Sauce
Put a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, a clove of garlic, two finely-chopped shallots, a little cayenne pepper, and salt into a saucepan with one breakfast cupful of vinegar. Place the pan on the fire, and when the contents have boiled for thirty minutes add a breakfast cupful of stock or good broth. Strain it through a fine hair-sieve and stir in an ounce and a half of liquefied butter mixed with a little flour to thicken it. Place it back in the saucepan and when it boils stir in a teaspoonful or so of parsley very finely chopped, two or three minced pickled gherkins and a little salt if required.
A sharp brown-butter-and-vinegar sauce of the classic sauce piquante family, meant for boiled or grilled meats. It comes together in well under an hour, but the vinegar reduction is what makes or breaks it.
- The hinge: reduce the vinegar hardThirty minutes of boiling is not a typo — it is there to drive off harshness and concentrate the aromatics. Cut this short and the sauce tastes like hot salad dressing.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in period usage runs 8 to 10 fluid ounces; a standard 1-cup measure is close enough for both the vinegar and the stock. Use a decent wine or cider vinegar rather than distilled white, which reduces to something flatly acrid.
- Liquefied butter mixed with flourAn ounce and a half of butter (3 tablespoons) melted and worked with a little flour. Whisk it into the strained liquid, then return to a boil for a minute or two to cook out the raw flour.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh strainer or a chinois does the job. The straining is not optional: the thyme stalk, bay and garlic clove all need to come out before thickening.
- Garlic and shallotsOne clove is a light hand by modern taste; leave it whole so it can be strained out, or crush it if you want more of it. The shallots are strained out too, so chop them roughly rather than finely if you prefer.
- Gherkins go in lastPickled gherkins added at the end and barely warmed keep their crunch and their acidity; left to simmer they go limp. The recipe's final seasoning check comes after they are in.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup of finished sauce. It belongs with boiled beef, tongue, pork, or grilled kidneys and chops — anything fatty that wants cutting.
Sauces built on a hard-reduced vinegar and aromatics, finished with chopped pickles and parsley, are the standard nineteenth-century sauce piquante. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, was not a chef by trade but a maître d'hôtel with an encyclopedic grasp of what came out of his kitchens, and his 1896 book reads as a working record of that repertoire — a great many sauces among them, most of them French in bone structure. The gherkins themselves point to the period's dependence on the pickle jar: small cucumbers put up in vinegar turn up as garnish, as relish, and, as here, chopped into the sauce at the last moment.