Sauces and Gravies: Table Sauces

Not all sauces came finished from the kitchen in a sauceboat. From the eighteenth century, Americans (who shared this trait with the English) mixed sauces to their taste at table from an assortment of pots, cruets, and casters that were the housewife’s pride. The well-stocked table boasted a number of “store sauces” that could be added at table by diners to please their individual palates. Although a few store sauces might have been commercially made (and thus “store-bought”), the term referred to sauces with long shelf lives that were part of the larder. Cookery books through the early twentieth century offered many recipes for homemade ketchup, mustard, chutney, Worcestershire sauce, and flavored vinegar, which could add zing to a dish. In her Domestic Receipt-Book (1858) Catharine Beecher explained, “Soy is a fashionable sauce for fish, which is mixed on the plate with drawn butter.” The soy Beecher described was not the true Asian product but rather a homemade concoction of caramelized sugar, salt, anchovies, and flavorings. Beecher’s schematic of a properly set table showed a set of casters that would hold such seasonings, including the celery-flavored vinegar that Beecher wrote “is fine to keep in the castor stand.” Other authorities loathed the omnipresent casters on the grounds that they destroyed flavor, because spices quickly staled and olive oil turned rancid in the poorly sealed table ornaments. Casters had largely fallen from fashion by the early twentieth century, although commercial “steak sauces,” such as A1 Steak Sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and ketchup are commonly used.