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Sweets and Cakes: Sauce
No. 226. Sauce Piquante (for Meat, Fowl, Game, Rabbit, &c.) One dessert-spoonful to a quarter pint of ordinary brown or white stock. It may be thickened by a roux made by frying two ounces of butter with two ounces of flour.
No. 227. Sauce for Venison, Hare, &c.
Two dessert-spoonsful of New Century Sauce to half a pint of game gravy or sauce, and a small teaspoonful of red currant jelly. No. 228. Tomato Sauce Piquante Fry three medium-sized tomatoes in one and a half ounce of butter. Pass this through a sieve, then boil it up in a bain-marie till it thickens, and add one dessertspoonful of New Century Sauce.
No. 229. Sauce for Roast Pork, Ham, &c.
Add to any ordinary white or brown sauce one dessertspoonful of New Century Sauce 1 The New Century Sauce may be bought at Messrs. Lazenby's, Wigmore Street, W. and two of port or Burgundy ounces of flour, and add if the sauce is brown, two of Chablis if white.
No. 230. For masking Cutlets, &c.
Making a roux by frying two ounces of butter with two two tablespoonsful of boiling stock. Stir in one dessertspoonful of New Century Sauce. Let it get cold, and it will then be quite firm and ready for masking cutlets, &c.
A cluster of five short sauce formulas, all of them variations on a single bottled condiment. They are less recipes than a manufacturer's suggestions, so the useful work is in decoding the proprietary ingredient and the imperial measures.
- New Century SauceA proprietary bottled sauce sold by Lazenby's of Wigmore Street, as the book's own footnote says, and no longer made. Its formula is not recorded, but the way it is used here — a dessertspoonful as a seasoning for stock, gravy or a white sauce — suggests one of the dark, spiced table sauces of which Worcestershire and Harvey's are the survivors; use Worcestershire or a good mushroom ketchup, starting with rather less than the stated quantity and tasting.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. A tablespoonful in a British book of this date is somewhere between 15 and 20 ml; spoon measures were not yet standardised. The amounts are small because the sauce is a concentrated seasoning, not a base.
- Imperial pintsA quarter pint here is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup; half a pint is 10 fl oz, or a scant cup and a quarter. British measures ran to 20 fl oz per pint.
- The roux ratioTwo ounces of butter to two ounces of flour: by volume that is a quarter cup of butter and a scant half cup of flour, enough to thicken about a pint of liquid to a coating consistency. Cook the flour in the butter a few minutes before any liquid goes in or the finished sauce tastes of raw paste.
- Bain-marieA basin or pan set over simmering water, not a modern water-bath oven. For the tomato sauce it prevents scorching while the purée reduces; a heavy saucepan over low heat with regular stirring does the same job faster.
- Tomato sauceThree medium tomatoes fried in butter and sieved make only a small quantity of sauce, and less again after it is boiled up to thicken; the recipe gives no yield. Skinning and seeding them first makes the sieving far quicker.
- MaskingNo. 230 is a coating sauce in the chaud-froid manner: a very stiff sauce, chilled until firm, then spread over cutlets to give a smooth surface. The book itself uses only the word "masking". Two tablespoons of stock to four ounces of roux is deliberately thick and will be almost a paste while hot.
- Currant jellyIn the venison and hare sauce the jelly is there for sweetness and body against a strongly gamey gravy. Add it off the heat and stir until it melts; boiled hard it turns gluey.
These five entries show a current in Victorian and Edwardian cookery writing: the bottled sauce as a shortcut to depth of flavour. The footnote naming Messrs Lazenby's of Wigmore Street reads as an advertisement, and Lazenby's was one of the great London sauce houses, best known as the proprietors of Harvey's Sauce. Such houses supplied a market of cooks who wanted the savoury lift of a long-simmered espagnole without the stockpot. New Century Sauce is no longer made and its formula is not recorded; the surviving family of anchovy, tamarind and vinegar sauces is the nearest guide to what these recipes were reaching for.