Curry Sauce
Put three ounces of curry powder, a small piece of garlic, one button onion, chopped fine, a drachm each of mace and nutmeg, half an ounce of dried lemon peal in a glass jar and pour over three pints of vinegar. Cork securely for ten days, strain and bottle. A very small quantity of this sauce will impart a piquant flavor to soup, gravies and entrees.
This is a bottled seasoning vinegar rather than a sauce in the modern sense - closer to a Worcestershire or mushroom ketchup than to anything poured over rice. It keeps well and is used by the spoonful.
- A drachmAn apothecaries' drachm is 1/8 ounce, about 3.9 g, though the avoirdupois dram is about 1.8 g. For ground mace and nutmeg either reading works out to somewhere between a rounded teaspoon and two teaspoons of each.
- Quantities in cupsThree ounces of curry powder is about 3/4 cup by volume; three pints is 6 cups of vinegar. Half an ounce of dried lemon peel is roughly a loose 1/4 cup of strips.
- Button onionA pearl or pickling onion, not a scallion. One of them, finely chopped, is under a tablespoon - the onion and garlic are here for background, not for body.
- Which vinegarThe recipe says only 'vinegar'; a plain malt or cider vinegar at ordinary strength is the likely intent. Use something at 5 percent acidity; the acid is what keeps the raw garlic and onion in check over the ten-day steep and afterwards in the bottle.
- Dried lemon peelPeel from unwaxed lemons, pith removed, dried until brittle. Some commercial peel is candied or oil-treated, which will muddy the result; fresh zest works but gives a brighter, shorter-lived flavour.
- The steepTen days at room temperature, out of direct light, with a shake once a day. Curry powders vary enormously in salt and chilli, so taste at day seven - a cheap heavily salted blend can be assertive well before the full time.
- StrainingStrain through muslin or a coffee filter rather than a sieve. The ground spice throws a heavy sediment that will otherwise settle in the bottle and cloud everything you pour.
- Yield and useAbout 5 1/2 cups after straining and loss to the solids. A teaspoon or two lifts a gravy or a soup; more than that and it reads as vinegar. Refrigerate once opened and expect the aromatics to fade over a few months.
Bottled seasoning vinegars and "store sauces" were a fixture of Anglo-American cooking from the early nineteenth century onward, made at home in quantity and kept on the sideboard to sharpen whatever came out of the kitchen. Commercial curry powder had been sold in Britain since the late 1700s and was thoroughly domesticated by 1900 - treated less as an Indian seasoning than as a general savoury spice, of a piece with mace, nutmeg and lemon peel, all of which appear here.