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Mint Sauce, for Lamb
Mint sauce, the accompaniment for roast lamb, and for it fresh young mint leaves should be used. Pick the best leaves from the stems until there are two tablespoonfuls, and chop them very fine. Mix these with two and one-half tablespoonfuls of sugar, four tablespoonfuls of vinegar and half a saltspoonful of salt, and let them stand several hours before serving.
A three-ingredient sauce that stands or falls on the mint and the standing time. The quantities are small — this makes about a third of a cup, enough for four to six servings alongside a roast.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful is an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there to sharpen the sugar, not to season the sauce.
- The vinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar; white or cider vinegar would both suit, and modern supermarket vinegar is standardised at about 5 percent acidity, which period vinegar was not. Four tablespoons of it against two and a half of sugar gives a sauce that is frankly sour; malt vinegar is the traditional British choice, and the vinegar can be cut with a tablespoon of water if it is too sharp for your taste.
- Which mintSpearmint is the mint meant here — it is the standard garden mint of the period and of English mint sauce. Peppermint is too aggressive and menthol-forward for lamb.
- ChoppingChop the leaves dry on a board rather than in a processor, which bruises them to a dark paste. A pinch of the sugar sprinkled on the board helps the knife bite and keeps the leaves from sticking.
- The standing timeThis is the hinge. Several hours at room temperature lets the vinegar and sugar draw the mint oils out; served immediately the sauce tastes of vinegar with green flecks in it. Make it before the lamb goes in the oven.
- Not a jellyThis is a thin, pourable, sharp sauce spooned over sliced meat, quite different from the sweet green mint jelly sold in jars. Expect it to be loose.
- KeepingIt holds a day or two refrigerated, but the mint darkens and the fresh note fades. Make it the day it is wanted.
Mint sauce with lamb is a long-standing English convention, treated as familiar by eighteenth-century cookery writers, and it passed to American tables along with other English roast-meat habits. The sweet-sour pairing belongs to an older family of vinegar-and-sugar sauces served with roast meat, the same logic that puts apple with pork and currant jelly with venison — acid and sweetness cutting through fat. That the author specifies fresh young leaves is a practical note from a period when mint was a dooryard herb rather than a supermarket clamshell, since late-season mint turns coarse.