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Mint Sauce
Take fresh, young mint, strip leaves from stems, wash, drain on a sieve, or dry them on a cloth; chop very fine, put in a saucetureen, and to three heaped table-spoons mint add two of pounded sugar; let remain a few minutes well mixed together, and pour over it gradually six table-spoons of good vinegar. If members of the family like the flavor, but not the substance of the mint, the sauce may be strained after it has stood for two or three hours, pressing it well to extract all the flavor. It is better to make the sauce an hour or two before dinner, so that the vinegar may be impregnated with the mint. The addition of three or four table-spoons of the liquor from the boiling lamb is an improvement.
An uncooked mint and vinegar relish for roast or boiled lamb, and essentially identical to the mint sauce still served in Britain. The only thing that really matters is giving it time to steep.
- Make it aheadThe instruction to mix it an hour or two before dinner is the hinge. Vinegar needs that long to draw the oils out of the chopped leaves; mixed and served immediately it tastes of raw vinegar with green flecks in it.
- Quantities and yieldThree heaped tablespoons of chopped mint is roughly a packed half-cup or so of leaves before chopping, about one supermarket bunch. With 6 tablespoons of vinegar and 2 of sugar it makes something over half a cup of sauce, more if the optional lamb liquor is added — a small serving bowl for a family dinner.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine in a mortar, a step needed when loaf sugar was the norm. Ordinary granulated sugar dissolves well enough here; caster sugar dissolves faster still.
- "Good vinegar"Cider vinegar would be the likely household choice here, malt in British practice; period vinegar strength was not standardised, whereas modern distilled and cider vinegars are usually about 5 percent. Malt gives the most traditional flavour; white wine vinegar is milder and lets the mint through more clearly.
- Sauce tureenA lidded serving dish that went to the table. Any non-reactive bowl works for mixing — avoid bare aluminium or unlined copper, which react with vinegar.
- The lamb liquorOnly useful if the lamb was boiled rather than roasted, as boiled lamb was common in this period. From a roast, a spoonful of skimmed pan juices does the same job. Added fat will separate as the sauce sits, so stir before serving.
- Mint varietySpearmint is the right plant, not peppermint, whose menthol reads as medicinal against lamb. Strip the leaves and discard the stems; stems are fibrous and add bitterness when chopped in.
- StrainingIf you strain, press hard through a fine sieve as the recipe directs, to extract all the flavour; you will lose some volume. The strained version keeps better than the one with the chopped leaves left in, which discolours as it stands.
History: Mint with lamb is a long-standing British pairing, and vinegar-and-sugar mint sauce is recorded in English cookery writing well before The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s. The custom is often traced to the acidity cutting the fat of mutton, though mint's older reputation as a digestive aid for rich meat may have had as much to do with it. A nineteenth-century American household sauce chapter drew heavily on inherited English practice: bottled catsups, made mustards, and a few uncooked relishes meant to be mixed the same afternoon they were eaten. The suggestion of adding liquor from the boiling lamb points to a kitchen in which boiled leg of lamb with caper or mint sauce was familiar family fare, so that pot liquor would have been to hand.