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Sauce for Loin of Veal
Put the minced yolks of three hard-boiled eggs into a small stewpan with some sweet herbs, two tablespoonfuls of well-washed currants, one tablespoonful of fine breadcrumbs, one teaspoonful of sugar, two whole cloves, and a little beaten cinnamon. Moisten the ingredients with a sufficient quantity of clear gravy, and stir the sauce over the fire until boiling. Put three slices of Seville oranges in it, and serve.
A survival of the old sweet-and-spiced meat sauces, thickened not with flour but with sieved egg yolk. It comes together in five minutes once the stock is hot; the only real skill is judging consistency.
- The hinge: yolk is the thickenerThe hinge: yolk and crumb thicken the sauce -- the recipe says minced yolks, though pushing them through a fine sieve gives a smoother result. Add the gravy gradually; the recipe has the sauce stirred over the fire until it boils, so keep it moving to stop the yolk catching.
- "Clear gravy"In period usage an unthickened meat gravy or clear meat stock, as opposed to a floured or roux-based gravy. The recipe specifies only "a sufficient quantity": add it gradually until the sauce coats a spoon.
- "Sweet herbs"The period shorthand for the mild kitchen herbs: thyme, parsley, marjoram, a bay leaf. Tie them in a bundle so they can be lifted out, since the sauce is served unstrained.
- "Beaten cinnamon"Cinnamon bark pounded in a mortar rather than the fine modern powder. The recipe says only "a little"; a small pinch of ground cinnamon is enough, and more will bury the veal.
- Whole clovesTwo cloves left loose in a small sauce are easy to bite into. Fish them out before serving, or stick them into the herb bundle.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Washing removed grit and stems; modern packaged fruit needs only a brief soak in hot water or stock to plump.
- Seville orangesBitter oranges, in season only in mid-winter and rarely stocked. The slices are there for sourness, not sweetness — a substitute of thin lemon slices with a little orange zest is closer than sweet orange.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of gravy, so the amount of sauce depends on how much is added. It is served with the carved meat.
Sweet, fruited, spiced sauces for roast meat are the oldest layer of the European kitchen: currants, cinnamon, cloves, sugar and sour orange were standard companions to veal and mutton from the medieval period into the eighteenth century, and English cookery books carried them well past the point when French practice had turned toward stock reductions and butter. By the time Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel at the turn of the twentieth century — front-of-house rather than chef, a distinction he was known for — a sauce like this was already an heirloom rather than a fashion; his book gathers a great many such older English and American formulas alongside the à la mode dishes of the hotel dining room. The Seville orange is the tell. Bitter oranges reached Europe centuries before the sweet kind and remained the cooking orange long afterward, which is why they survive today mainly in marmalade, bigarade sauce for duck, and recipes like this one.