Home › Game › Mint Sauce (Mix one tablespoonful of white)
Mint Sauce (Mix one tablespoonful of white)
Mix one tablespoonful of white sugar to half a teacup of good vinegar; add mint, chopped fine; one-half teaspoonful of salt. Serve with roast lamb or mutton.
A three-ingredient English table sauce that depends almost entirely on proportion. The original assumes you know how much mint to use and how strong your vinegar is; both are worth pinning down.
- Half a teacupTeacup measures in American books of this period are not fixed, running roughly 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacup is somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 cup. The sauce is forgiving as long as the sugar and salt stay in proportion.
- How much mintThe recipe gives no quantity. Aim for about 3 tablespoons of finely chopped spearmint leaves to 1/4 cup vinegar; the sauce should look green and thick with leaf rather than merely flecked.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period was less standardised than the 5 percent distilled product on shelves now, so "good vinegar" is not a fixed strength. Cider or malt vinegar is a reasonable choice here, and if the result bites too hard, cut it with a tablespoon of water.
- Dissolve the sugar firstSugar will not go into cold vinegar quickly. Warm the vinegar just enough to dissolve the sugar and salt, then cool it before adding the mint, or the leaves will darken and go limp.
- Let it standMint sauce is raw and needs time rather than heat. Thirty minutes at room temperature is the minimum for the vinegar to draw flavour from the leaves; an hour is better. It keeps a couple of days refrigerated, though the colour dulls.
- YieldMakes roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup, enough for four to six servings of roast lamb. It is spooned over the meat at the table, not cooked with it.
- Why it sits in the game chapterNothing about this sauce is specific to wild birds or venison -- it is directed at roast lamb and mutton, as the recipe itself says.
Mint sauce is the surviving member of a much larger family of sharp herb-and-vinegar sauces that medieval and early modern English cooks served with roast meats, on the reasoning that acid cut the richness of fat. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most of those sauces had fallen away, but the mint one attached itself firmly to lamb and mutton and stayed there; it is still the standard British accompaniment to a roast leg. American household books of the turn of the century reproduced it more or less unchanged, usually in a single sentence. The insistence on white sugar may be a small period marker: refined white sugar is often said to have been cheap enough by then to specify casually, where an earlier cook might have used whatever loaf or brown sugar was in the house.