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Harvey Sauce
Prepare twelve fluid-ounces of sauce made with mushroom and walnut catsup, garlic, soy and sprats, using in proportion one-half gallon each of the catsup to one-half pint of soy, four ounces of garlic and one and one-half pounds of sprats, and boiling these together for fifteen minutes and straining. Put this in a saucepan with a little more soy and one teaspoonful of cayenne and stir over the fire till warm.
Oscar gives this as a two-stage operation: a large batch of flavoring base, of which only twelve fluid ounces are drawn off and finished with soy and cayenne. Read the proportions as a formula rather than a shopping list.
- Scale firstThe base as written comes to roughly a gallon of liquid (half a gallon each of the two catsups plus half a pint of soy) plus a pound and a half of fish, and yields far more than the twelve fluid ounces called for. Divide the whole thing by eight or ten before you start; the ratios hold.
- SpratsSmall oily herring, sold whole and salted in Oscar's day. Salt-packed anchovies are the closest available substitute and dissolve the same way; count on about the same weight, rinsed of surface salt.
- Walnut catsupMade from green (unripe) walnuts salted, pressed and spiced — dark, thin and intensely savory, nothing like a walnut paste. It is still sold by British specialty grocers; a mushroom-only base is a fair compromise but loses the tannic edge.
- Mushroom catsupAlso a thin brown liquid, not the modern tomato product: mushrooms salted down, drained and the liquor spiced and boiled. Do not substitute tomato ketchup, which will make the sauce sweet and thick.
- SoyPlain fermented soy sauce. Naturally brewed shoyu is right; avoid anything labeled sweet, dark-thick or teriyaki.
- GarlicFour ounces peeled is several heads, depending on their size. At half-gallon scale that reads as a strong but not dominant note; keep the proportion if you shrink the batch.
- StrainingThe fifteen-minute boil is only meant to break down the fish and extract the garlic. Strain through a fine sieve and then through muslin — grit and bone fragments from salted fish will otherwise settle in the bottle.
- The finishing stageWarm only. Boiling the strained sauce again drives off the soy's aroma and concentrates an already very salty liquid past the point of usefulness. A teaspoon of cayenne in twelve fluid ounces is assertive; add half and taste.
- Keeping and usingThis is a condiment measured in teaspoons — for gravies, chops, hashes, oyster stews. Keep it refrigerated in a clean glass bottle and treat it as a fresh sauce, not a shelf-stable preserve, since no proportions for a keeping brine are given.
Harvey's Sauce was one of the great English bottled sauces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, traditionally credited to a Peter Harvey, an innkeeper on the road out of London, whose recipe was said to have been commercialized by his family and later by Lazenby's — an attribution repeated everywhere but thinly documented. Fish-and-mushroom-based brown sauces of this type, descended from the English taste for anchovy essence and for imported "soy," bear a family resemblance to what became Worcestershire sauce, and cookbooks print domestic versions — imitation Harvey's is firmly attested in later writers such as Kitchiner. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms, Harvey's was ordinarily bought by the bottle; that the hotel kitchen compounded its own, in gallon quantities, says a good deal about the scale at which it worked and about the era's habit of building flavor from long-fermented savory liquids rather than from stock alone.