Another classic sauce, which has been chronicled many a time; I recently made it and found it so good, I cannot resist mentioning it.  The ingredients should expand experimentally to achieve your chosen movement in the sauce.

Before I start the post, I’d like to mention something about the pictures I’ve been posting here on the site.  It turns out that I’ve been encoding pictures incorrectly this whole time, and people who use Internet Explorer and Firefox have been seeing some very lackluster images.  I’m a Mac person, and the web browser Safari uses the correct color profiling, while IE and Firefox don’t without some futzing.

Here’s an example of the problem:

The left side is what people using IE and Firefox see, while I’ve been seeing the right side this whole time.  Big difference, huh?  To atone for my sins, I’ll be fixing every image I’ve posted as the week rolls on.  The pictures below should show up correctly…I hope.

I love lamb in its various forms, be it rack or leg or brain, but until I made this “sauce”, mint had never entered the picture.  Sure, I had always known about the paring of lamb with mint jelly, but the thought of marring lamb’s lovely flavor with something that I could only imagine as being sickeningly sweet made no sense to me.  Then I found out that this recipe is nothing like mint jelly at all, and the cogs started churning–albeit slowly–in my head.  It turns out that mint jelly is something that only Americans use with lamb, and folks from the UK joke that we should really be using it with peanut butter to make sandwiches. They might very well be right.

When I initially read the recipe, it seemed as though the amount of ingredients were off and there might have been one or two things missing.  I mean, Mr. Henderson asks for teaspoons of sugar and malt vinegar.  Teaspoons?!  This recipe is supposed to make enough sauce to be served with a whole leg of lamb?!  It turns out that this is a “sauce” in the same way that Green Sauce is considered a “sauce” and that the proportions are indeed correct, but I’ll explain that later.  The components were combined with three simple steps:

1. Finely chop the mint

2. Melt the demerara sugar with a small amount of boiling water and add malt vinegar

3. Pour the sugar/vinegar mixture over the mint and mix

That’s it!  With  a little prep you could have a mint sauce in about four minutes.  I wish I had chopped the mint a bit finer to make it more sauce-like, but the flavor was still there.  Highly minty as one would expect, but with a slight kick from the malt vinegar and a subtle sweet finish.

Shortly after I completed the mint sauce the oven timer went off as my rack of lamb had finished.  For a flavor comparison, I took a bite of the lamb alone.  Yep, that’s lamb: meaty, perfectly gamy, and just a little sweet.  The next bite had a tiny amount of the mint sauce applied to test the waters.  It was completely different, almost as if I wasn’t eating lamb at all.  Considering the minuscule amount of mint sauce I had eaten, I can understand how a little bit of this stuff goes a long way. The flavor had changed dramatically, there was no gaminess at all.  It just tasted like meat. It was nice, but I eat lamb because I enjoy the unique taste that lamb brings to the table.  Adding the mint sauce might be more important when it comes to eating mutton I suppose, but I think I’ll still be taking my lamb plain.

It is nice to know that I could whip up a batch of mint sauce in a very short period of time for guests that want it.

One down, eighty one to go.