A Year of Cooking Genealogically, Sharp Sauce

Good morning!  It's March in Cincinnati, which means Ole' Man Winter is getting in it's last licks of cold and snow.  There's no better way to kick off a Monday than stay inside and cook.  Well, there might be way better things to do, but this is the best I could come up with.

So, I've been holding out on you, as far as this little recipe journal is concerned. If you've been reading any of the last blog entries, none of the recipes have been too weird, right?  Lacking instructions maybe, and some funky names and methods but the results have been surprisingly tasty.  But in all truthful honesty the journal has an entire section on vegetables.  Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, nothing wrong with veggies, right?  And you'd be correct.  Except Kate's veggie recipes all feature 'gelatin' prominently.  Yes, you guessed it, the dreaded vegetable salads of yesterday.  I didn't quite have the fortitude or copious amounts of gelatin to tackle a vegetable salad today, so the first recipe up is Sharp Sauce.

Ingredients and Instructions
Chop pimientos, white onions, 1/2 green pepper, some celery and a dill pickle.  Pour over this French dressing and let stand a day.  Garnish with stuffed olives. This is nice with cold meat that's rather insipid.  It gives it pep and helps with the leftovers.

So, well, okay.  There's a LOT to unpack here.  Once again there are no measurements, other than 1/2 of a green pepper.  Though her handwriting is a bit garbled, I'm reasonably confident that the first ingredient is pimientos.  In case you're wondering, "a pimiento, pimento, or cherry pepper is a variety

of large, red, heart-shaped chili pepper that measures 3 to 4 in long and 2 to 3 in wide. The flesh of the pimiento is sweet, succulent, and more aromatic than that of the red bell pepper." Fortunately, pimientos come pre-chopped in a jar now.  I decided to cut vegetables into roughly a similar shape and quantity as the pimientos, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup.  I did not have a whole dill pickle, but I did have some tasty Zesty Garlic Pickle chips in the fridge, and I figured the addition of some zestiness couldn't hurt.  After chopping all the vegetables, I set them in a colander to drain a bit so that the finished sauce wouldn't be watery - hey, I have to taste this stuff!  The final addition is the electric neon orange french dressing - I used about 8 ounces - and Voila! Sharp Sauce.


Now to the discussion of 'meat that's rather insipid'.  Merriam Webster gives this definition:

in·sip·id – adjective = lacking flavor.
synonyms: tasteless, flavorless, bland, weak, wishy-washy; lacking vigor or interest.

You might be wondering why anyone would make or serve insipid or tasteless meat. Not to be flippant, but I think it boils down (no pun intended) to two things - members of my family tree were on the poorer side, and secondly had a strong British ancestral heritage.  Boiling meat, after all, is cheap and easy, so it's closer to the diet of farmers than royalty. Boiling, stewing, poaching and roasting works well on tougher, cheaper cuts of meat.  And I'm quite sure there was little availability of exotic spice blends to 'pep up the leftovers'.  My mother and grandmothers could cook a roast to within an inch of it's life, so to speak, AND my dad didn't like spicy food, so trust me when I tell you I've eaten my share of insipid meat.  

That's where Sharp Sauce comes in.  The website Foods of England describes it as "a sharply-flavoured sauce for fowl, game and red meat. Eaton 1822 has simply wine vinegar boiled with sugar. Soyer 1845 has chopped onions with chilli vinegar, vinegar, caramel and water. Francatelli 1852 uses chopped mixed pickle with breadcrumbs." It's listed as a 'lost food' of English cooking (if anyone's looking, I found it). And randomly, believe it or not, Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce was served on the Titanic, albeit in second class dining. The very same Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce was also a featured dinner on Downtown Abbey.  William Shakespeare even refers to it in Romeo and Juliet during the banter between Romeo and Mercutio in Act 2, Scene 4:

MERCUTIO
Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting (apple). It is a most sharp sauce.
 ROMEO
And is it not well served into a sweet goose? 

Verdict?  I love Romeo and Juliet, but I'm not cooking goose anytime soon.  Side note: if you've ever wondered about the phrase 'your goose is cooked' consult World Wide Words for an interesting, time wasting, somewhat mind enriching exercise. As for sharp sauce?  Well, we'll have to wait a day to find out.  As for insipid meat, I'm thinking a plain turkey burger should suffice.  I have no intention of boiling anything any time soon, though fair warning - in future recipes, Kate does call for boiling meat.  You should know however, stuffed olives, sliced or whole, will NOT be added to this sauce, as DH detests olives with the same intensity as beets.  However, he had no problem inhaling almost the entire pan of brownie like Pawtucket Fingers!