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Mint Sauce
2 tablespoons sugar cup vinegar Wash mint and pick leaves from stems. Chop fine. Add sugar to vinegar. Pour over mint leaves. Let stand one hour.
I 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter teaspoon salt
A cold, uncooked mint sauce of the English type: chopped mint steeped in sweetened vinegar. The method survives intact even though the quantities in this printing are incomplete.
- The vinegar quantity is incompleteThe line reads "cup vinegar" with no fraction, and the fraction has dropped out in printing. Two tablespoons of sugar suggests something less than a full cup of vinegar; taste and adjust rather than trusting the figure as printed.
- No mint quantity is givenJudge by volume of leaves after chopping. The sauce should look like wet green flecks suspended in liquid, not a clear vinegar with a few specks in it.
- Choice of vinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar. Malt vinegar is the traditional English choice and gives a rounder result; wine vinegars read as too fruity against lamb.
- Dissolve the sugar firstThe instruction adds the sugar to the vinegar before either touches the mint, which lets the sugar dissolve without stirring the leaves about.
- Chop, do not poundThe recipe says to chop the leaves fine. A sharp knife and a few decisive passes keep the leaves green.
- The hour of standingThe recipe calls for a full hour's rest before serving, which is what draws the mint into the vinegar. Serve at room temperature.
- Yield and useSpooned sparingly beside roast or cold lamb. The yield cannot be given, since the vinegar quantity has dropped out of the printing.
Mint sauce is the fixed English accompaniment to lamb and mutton, and cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic reproduced it in almost identical form for well over a century: mint, sugar, vinegar, no cooking. Its persistence owes something to sheer usefulness, since a sharp cold sauce makes cold sliced meat palatable in a way that congealed gravy does not. The pairing of vinegar and sweetening with rich meat is much older than the phrase "mint sauce" and belongs to the long medieval habit of cutting fat with acid; mint is generally traced as the English survivor of that family of green sauces, while continental cooks kept parsley and sorrel versions instead.