Home › February › Sauce À L'Italienne
Sauce À L'Italienne
2½ tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons finely chopped onion. 2 tablespoons finely chopped carrot. 2 tablespoons finely chopped lean uncooked ham. 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns. 3 cloves. 2 sprays marjoram. 3 tablespoons flour, 1 cup Brown Stock, 1¼ cups white wine. 1 clove garlic. 2 teaspoons finely chopped parsley.
PROCESS: Brown butter in a sauce-pan, add onion, carrot, ham, peppercorns, cloves and marjoram, and cook five minutes. Add flour and stir until flour is well browned; add gradually stock and wine, strain, add garlic and simmer five minutes. Remove garlic and pour around Baked Lake Trout. Sprinkle with parsley.
A small brown sauce built on a mirepoix and a well-browned roux, meant to be spooned around a whole baked fish. It comes together in about twenty minutes and the only real skill is in the roux.
- Brown the roux properlyThe instruction to "stir until flour is well browned" is the hinge of the recipe. Give it five to eight minutes over medium heat until it smells toasted and turns the color of a hazelnut shell; a pale roux leaves the sauce tasting raw and floury, and a scorched one turns it bitter with no way back.
- The wine measurement"1/4 cups white wine" is a typo of some kind. A quarter cup against one cup of stock is the proportion that makes sense for a sauce of this type; if you want it sharper, go to a third of a cup and simmer a minute longer.
- Sprays of marjoramA "spray" is a small sprig. Two sprigs of fresh marjoram, or about half a teaspoon dried, is right. Both go in whole and are removed at the straining stage.
- Whole spices are seasoning, not textureThe peppercorns and cloves are there to perfume the fat and are strained out before the garlic goes in. Do not be tempted to grind them; three cloves ground into a cup of sauce would dominate everything.
- The garlic is an infusionOne peeled clove, left whole, simmered five minutes and then lifted out. This gives a background warmth rather than a garlic flavor, which is the point of the technique.
- Lean uncooked hamThis means raw cured ham of the prosciutto or country-ham type, not a slice of deli sandwich ham. Two tablespoons finely chopped is enough; pancetta is a reasonable substitute.
- Brown stockThe book's own recipe, but any well-made unsalted brown veal or beef stock works. Use unsalted or lightly salted stock: the ham adds salt and the sauce reduces.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly a cup, enough to ring a fish serving four to six. Strain into a warm pitcher if the fish is not ready, since the sauce sets and skins as it cools.
Sauce à l'italienne belongs to the family of small brown sauces catalogued by nineteenth-century French kitchens, where "à l'italienne" was a style label rather than a claim of Italian origin; in the classical repertoire it is a demi-glace flavored with duxelles of mushroom, ham and herbs, and here it appears simplified to a brown roux with mirepoix, wine and a hint of clove. That a 1913 book of Sunday dinners for the home cook expects a made-from-scratch brown stock and a French sauce name is in keeping with the period's domestic-science writers, who were consciously importing restaurant technique into the middle-class kitchen.