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Piquant Sauce
Prepare some melted butter, flavor it to taste with tarragon, or malt vinegar, a little pepper and mustard if liked. Stir the sauce over the fire till cooked, then move it to the side, thicken it with the yolks of two eggs, and serve. (2) Chop very fine three mushrooms, one shallot and a small carrot. Melt one ounce of butter in a stewpan, put in the above ingredients and fry them till nicely browned; then stir in two tablespoonsfuls of flour and one-half pint of rich brown stock, add a bay leaf, one or two sprigs of thyme and one tablespoonful of Harvey's sauce, and stir the whole over the fire till boiling, then cook over a slow fire for twenty minutes. Stir in one-half teacupful of vinegar and season to taste with salt, pepper and a little cayenne pepper. Strain the sauce and it is ready for use. Red Piquant Sauce (Spanish).
Soften two or three red capsicums for a little less than a minute in boiling water, dry them, put them in a mortar with a little garlic and pound them to a paste. Add a little water, then turn it into a saucepan containing one breakfast cupful of boiling oil and season with salt and vinegar. Fish should be cooked in this sauce and served with it poured over them.
Three sauces under one heading: an egg-thickened butter sauce, a classic brown sauce piquante, and a Spanish chile-and-oil sauce for fish. The second is the one worth cooking most often, and the first is the one most likely to go wrong.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not a puddleIn nineteenth-century English cookery "melted butter" means a thin white sauce built on butter, flour and water or stock — closer to a light béchamel than to drawn butter. Version (1) assumes you already have some standing ready; it never says how much.
- The yolks must not boilMove the pan off the heat before the yolks go in, temper them with a ladle of the hot sauce, and return the pan to a very low flame only until it coats a spoon. Anything approaching a simmer curdles it into sweet scrambled egg.
- Harvey's sauceA bottled English condiment of anchovy, soy, vinegar and spice, standard in Victorian larders and now very hard to find. Worcestershire is the closest widely available relative and can be used in roughly the same quantity.
- Half a pint of stockOn American measure that is 8 fl oz, one US cup; on imperial measure it would be 10 fl oz, and the recipe's "teacupful," "breakfast cupful" and bottled Harvey's sauce are English idiom, so which is meant is not certain. Use a genuinely dark, well-reduced brown stock — the sauce is strained, so it lives or dies on that liquid.
- Teacupful and breakfast cupfulBoth are loose period measures. A teacup runs roughly 5 to 6 fl oz and a breakfast cup 8 to 10 fl oz, but the originals varied by household. Add the vinegar in the brown sauce by degrees and taste; half a teacup at once will flatten it.
- Slow fire, twenty minutesA bare simmer, uncovered. The purpose is to cook out the flour and reduce, so expect the half pint to come back to something appreciably thicker before the vinegar goes in.
- CapsicumsHot red chiles rather than sweet bell peppers, given the name of the sauce; whether fresh or dried is not clear from the minute in boiling water. Adjust heat to what you have, and remove seeds if you want the color without the fire.
- Boiling oil and a wet pastePounded chile paste loosened with water, dropped into a cup of very hot oil, will spatter violently. Add it off the heat, well away from your face, and stand back.
- YieldThe brown sauce makes roughly a cup after straining. The recipe states no number of servings for either sauce.
Sauce piquante belongs to the classical French repertoire familiar to Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen: a brown base sharpened with vinegar and aromatics, traditionally served with reheated or plainer meats whose flavor needed lifting. What marks these particular versions as Anglo-American rather than strictly French is the bottle of Harvey's sauce, a commercial anchovy-and-soy condiment popular in British and American households through the nineteenth century and now gone from shelves. The third variant, pounded chile with garlic finished in hot oil, sits closer to the Iberian and Latin sauces that reached American cookbooks under the broad label "Spanish," and it calls for the fish to be poached in the sauce and served over them.