Indian Sauce
In a small saucepan put one tablespoonful each of chopped onion, mushrooms and parsley and one-quarter of a teaspoonful of paprika. Add one cupful of vinegar and boil slowly until the vinegar is nearly evaporated. Add onethird of a cupful of strong stock, two tablespoonfuls more of mushrooms, one tablespoonful of capers and two little chopped gherkins. Simmer until it is as thick as cream, add a wineglassful of sherry, bring again to the boiling point and take at once from the fire.
A sharp, reduced vinegar sauce for roast or braised game. It is essentially a sauce piquante, and the whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- The hinge: reduce the vinegar hardBoiling a full cup of vinegar down to almost nothing is what makes this sauce edible rather than punishing. Stop when there is perhaps a tablespoon of syrupy liquid left in the pan; if you cut this step short, no amount of stock or sherry will round it out.
- Use a non-reactive panA cup of vinegar boiled down in bare cast iron or unlined copper will pick up metal and taste of it. Stainless or enamelled is what you want.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, so a scant quarter cup of sherry. Dry or medium-dry amontillado suits game far better than a sweet cream sherry.
- Strong stockThis means a well-reduced brown stock with real body -- the sort that sets to jelly when cold. Game or veal stock is ideal; ordinary canned broth is too thin and will not thicken to the "as thick as cream" stage without long boiling that oversalts it.
- Vinegar choiceCider or white wine vinegar, around 5 percent acidity. Distilled white vinegar reduces to something harsh and flat.
- Gherkins and capersTake the "little chopped gherkins" as small sour pickles rather than sweet ones; French cornichons are the closest thing on a modern shelf. Rinse brined capers so they season the sauce rather than salting it.
- The sherry goes in off the heat, near enoughBring it back to a boil and pull it immediately, as written. A long simmer after the sherry drives off the aroma that is the point of adding it.
- YieldRoughly half to two-thirds of a cup of finished sauce, depending on how far you reduce it: a spooning sauce rather than a pouring one. Double it if you want more than a garnish.
The name says less about India than it looks; what the compiler meant by "Indian" here is not clear, since the only claim to it is a quarter teaspoonful of paprika. Paprika was still a relatively new arrival in American kitchens at this date, coming largely as a Hungarian import, where an older cook might have reached for cayenne. Structurally the sauce is French: onion, mushroom and parsley cooked with an acid, the acid reduced almost to a glaze, then let down with strong stock and finished with capers and gherkins, which is close to the standard construction of sauce piquante. Sharp vinegar sauces of this kind were commonly served with strong-flavoured roasts, game among them.