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Mint Sauce
Chop fine some fresh well-washed mint leaves, put them immediately into a sauce tureen, pour just enough vinegar to float the chopped leaves, add enough sugar to sweeten the vinegar, and allow it to stand for fifteen minutes. (2) Pour one-half pint of vinegar into a saucepan with one-half ounce of brown sugar and reduce it. Add one pint of water; boil for one minute only, mix in one tablespoonful of very finely-minced mint, and serve.
Two versions of the same condiment: an uncooked steeped sauce and a cooked, diluted one. Neither needs much beyond attention to the mint itself.
- Get the mint into the vinegar fastThe instruction to put the chopped leaves "immediately" into the tureen is the hinge of the first version. Cut mint darkens on the board as it stands, and getting it straight into the acid keeps the colour and the fresh aroma.
- Which mintSpearmint is the usual mint for English mint sauce. Peppermint is more aggressive and can read medicinal against lamb.
- Half a pint, half an ounceIn an American book of this period a pint is 16 fl oz, so half a pint of vinegar is one cup. Half an ounce of brown sugar is roughly a tablespoon, firmly packed.
- "Reduce it"No degree of reduction is given, and the recipe leaves the cook to judge it. Whatever the reduction, the pint of water that follows is what softens the sauce.
- The vinegarPlain cider or a light malt vinegar suits this best. Distilled white is harsh, and wine vinegars bring flavours that fight the mint.
- Sugar to taste, not to sweetness"Enough sugar to sweeten the vinegar" means enough to take the edge off, not to make a syrup. Start with a teaspoon per quarter cup and stop while the sauce is still sharp.
- Fifteen minutes is a minimumFifteen minutes -- The steeping time in the first version is short. Longer standing at room temperature gives a fuller infusion, and the sauce is best the day it is made.
- Yield and serviceService -- The first version gives no quantities at all; the second makes something over a pint of thin sauce. Serve at room temperature in a small tureen or sauceboat, stirred just before it goes to the table, since the mint settles.
Mint sauce with lamb is an English fixture that American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale, and Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf served a clientele who still expected English roasts. The pairing is old enough that its origins are traditional rather than documented; vinegar-and-herb sauces for meat run back through medieval European cookery, and mint's association with young lamb was well established in Britain by the eighteenth century. What is telling here is the second version, which boils the vinegar down, sweetens it, then dilutes it with an equal-and-more volume of water, making for a milder and more uniform sauce than the sharp household one. The first version is the domestic one, and the two sitting side by side in the same entry suggest an eye on both audiences at once.