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Mint Sauce
Mrs. J. Salter.
Mix one tablespoon of white sugar to half a teacup of good vinegar; add the mint and let it infuse for half an hour in a cool place before sending to the table. Serve with roast lamb or mutton.
A three-ingredient sauce whose success depends on proportions the original leaves vague. The mint is unmeasured and the vinegar unspecified, so both need judgement.
- TeacupTeacup measures were not standardised in this period; sources put a teacup at anywhere from 4 to 6 fl oz. Reckoning it at 6 fl oz makes half a teacup about 3 fl oz (6 tablespoons, or a generous 1/3 cup). With one tablespoon of sugar that gives a sharp, barely sweetened sauce.
- How much mintThe recipe gives no quantity. For 3 fl oz of vinegar, 2 to 3 tablespoons of finely chopped spearmint leaves is a workable proportion; less and the vinegar dominates entirely.
- The vinegar'Good vinegar' in a household of this period most likely meant cider or malt rather than distilled white, which is harsher and flatter; malt is the traditional choice for lamb in British and British-derived cookery. If your vinegar is a strong 6 percent, cutting it with a spoonful of boiling water softens it.
- Dissolving the sugarGranulated sugar dissolves slowly in cold vinegar. If you are impatient, stir it into a tablespoon of hot water first, or warm the vinegar slightly, then cool it before adding the mint so the leaves keep their colour.
- Chop, don't bruiseUse a sharp knife and cut the leaves cleanly. Mint pounded or mashed turns dark and grassy.
- The half hourThirty minutes in a cool place is the minimum for the flavour to move into the vinegar. Made several hours ahead the mint will darken, so same-day is best.
- YieldSomething under half a cup, enough for four to six servings. It is spooned over sliced roast lamb at the table, not cooked into anything.
Mint sauce with lamb is a British fixture of long standing, and cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century reproduce it in almost exactly this form: sugar, vinegar, chopped mint, no cooking. The logic is the same as that behind apple sauce with pork or currant jelly with venison, a sharp sweet-sour accompaniment to cut the fat of a roast, and mint had the advantage of growing vigorously in any kitchen garden with no attention at all. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, is a community cookbook of the type that spread rapidly through North America after the Civil War, and the attribution to Mrs. J. Salter is the whole point of the genre: recipes carried the authority of a neighbour rather than a professional. The brevity here is typical. Anyone likely to be reading the book already knew what mint sauce looked like and needed only the proportions.