Imperative cooking sauces:
I WAS recently obliged to spend a week eating in Munich and a thoroughly miser- able experience it was. It was a fine point whether German food is worse than En- glish and a largely academic one. For in England most restaurants don't serve En- glish food and no one of taste serves it regularly in his house. Restaurants are Italian, French, Greek, Indian, Chinese or 'international'. Whereas the vast majority of the many restaurants in Munich serve German food and the few supposedly Italian and Turkish exceptions are heavily influenced by the sawdust sausage. One is forced to eat German or starve.
In theory England could do with more — all right, not that many more but a few more — restaurants serving English food, and we should serve a few more English dishes at home — on one condition. The condition is this. The English like to think of their food as plain but, in fact, many of its best dishes are sauced. It is just that the sauce comes with rather than on the meat: roast beef and horseradish, lamb with mint or onion sauce, pork with mustard, ham with parsley sauce.
They all require first-rate meat, simple but careful cooking and the minimum of accompaniments. These terms seem too demanding for most English cooks, but even the rare occasions of success are always spoiled by bad sauces: slimy horse- radish with no oomph however much the label claims it to be 'extra-strong', mint sauce with next to no mint but lots of sugar, onion sauce with no stock, too much milk, few onions or, worse, reconstituted dehydrated onions or even the whole thing out of a packet, parsley sauce again with no stock, too much milk and not enough parsley, and an always universal absence of mustard made freshly — 10-15 minutes before use for maximum effect.
It is not much to ask of the housewife or husband, still less of the restaurant which pretends to serve English food. They are getting away with doing no true cooking on the meat; all that is needed is a few minutes on the sauce. But this minimum is too much for these lazy, tenth-rate people.
For horseradish sauce: dig up your root of horseradish (2 min), scrape it clean (1 min), then grate it — if you have a child who has been naughty or anyone of any age with a cold, get them to do this (much complaining, but still only 3 min), mix it with wine vinegar, or if you insist cream (30 sec). For mint sauce: gather mint — not apple or other deviant varieties — enough to make two or three tablespoons chopped very fine (1 min), chop it (30 sec), mix it with wine vinegar, salt and, for my preference no sugar (30 sec). Let it stand for an hour or so. Neither mint nor horseradish are difficult to grow in your own garden or to find elsewhere. But shiftless English hosts and restaurateurs care so little for their guests or their food that these few minutes are too much trouble.
Good onion sauce and parsley sauce both need stock. Melt a large lump of butter, and flour, make a roux, add stock (of the relevant meat), slowly and stirring, then add the parsley, lots of it, or onions which have been stewing in butter. Just before serving, add two or three tables- poonfuls of cream or milk and a little salt. If you serve potatoes or broad beans with the lamb or ham, it is arguable that the onion or parsley sauces go even better with them than with the meat. In which case you need a lot of sauce — at least a pint for four chaps — stiff with onions or parsley.
Mustard is even less trouble. Mix Cole- man's with water. Much is made of the amount wasted. I don't see why: the English are not normally troubled at wast- ing things. Few nations, apart from the Americans, leave more food. The same principles go for other sauces such as mayonnaise — if you are really not up to mixing an egg yolk with some olive oil, I should give up cooking, eating and indeed living altogether.
But the most frequently used English sauce is the worst made of all: gravy. It is difficult to think of anything more childish- ly simple than scraping the bottom of a pan with a fish-slice then adding a little wine or stock so the meat juices and fats mix into a gravy. But it appears beyond the capabili- ties of most of the nation.
Given this disgusting national moral torpor, it is perhaps as well there are not more English restaurants and food. The true lesson of Munich is not more English food here but the deep gratitude we should have to all our immigrants who can and do cook. What Germany needs is not more Germans but more Turks.
Digby Anderson
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