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Gourmet's Sauce
Macerate together for two or three weeks two quarts of good mushroom catsup, one quart each of walnut catsup and port wine, one-half pint each of chili vinegar and soy, one breakfast cupful of essence of anchovies, four ounces each of bruised garlic and white pepper, one ounce of bruised chillies, and one ounce each of mace and cloves. Strain through a coarse muslin, and bottle for future use. This sauce is improved by keeping.
A nineteenth-century English-style "store sauce" — a cold-macerated concentrate meant to be kept in the pantry and used by the spoonful, not a sauce to be served on its own. The whole batch is roughly a gallon, so most cooks will want to scale it down.
- The hinge: this is a seasoning, not a sauceFinished, it is intensely salty and peppery, closer to Worcestershire than to gravy. It is added a teaspoon or a tablespoon at a time to soups, stews, chops and made dishes.
- Mushroom catsupSalted, pressed mushroom liquor spiced and reduced — dark, thin and savoury, with no tomato and no sugar. Not sold in most supermarkets now; British and specialist grocers stock it, or a good mushroom soy will stand in for the body if not the character.
- Walnut catsupMade from green (unripe) walnuts salted and pressed. Still produced in small quantities in Britain; there is no close substitute, and leaving it out will noticeably change the sauce.
- SoyIn 1896 "soy" means soy sauce, then usually a thick imported Chinese or Japanese type. Use a dark naturally brewed soy sauce; the half pint is one cup.
- Essence of anchoviesA commercial anchovy extract, salty and sharp. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a bottled Asian anchovy sauce, gives the same function. A breakfast cupful is about 8 to 10 fluid ounces — the breakfast cup was larger than a teacup, and the measure is genuinely loose.
- Chili vinegarVinegar steeped with dried hot chillies for a week or two, then strained. Any hot-pepper vinegar works; many bottled hot sauces are thicker and sweeter than what is wanted here.
- Four ounces each of garlic and white pepperThese are weights, not volumes: about a cup of peeled cloves, bruised, and roughly a cup of whole white peppercorns cracked, not ground. Ground pepper will cloud the sauce and clog the muslin.
- Maceration and strainingKeep it in glass or glazed stoneware with a non-metal lid, cool and dark, and shake it every few days for the two or three weeks. Strain through coarse muslin, then again through a finer cloth if you want a clear bottle; do not press the solids, or the sediment goes through with the liquid.
- Yield and keepingSomething over four quarts. The high salt, vinegar and alcohol content makes it stable at cool room temperature for a year or more, and it does improve for the first several months as the spice edges soften.
Sauces of this kind — a gallon of catsups, wine, spices and anchovy left to steep and then bottled — were the backbone of the English store cupboard from the late eighteenth century onward, and they sit comfortably alongside the rest of the Anglo-French repertoire in Oscar Tschirky's book. The name is generic rather than proprietary: cookbooks of the period print "Gourmet's Sauce," "Camp Sauce," "Quin's Sauce" and "Harvey's Sauce" with much the same list of ingredients, all of them relatives of the commercial anchovy-and-tamarind sauces that Lea & Perrins made famous. One thing dates it precisely: catsup here still means mushroom or walnut, the older sense of the word: tomato ketchup was winning by 1896 but had not yet taken the name outright.