Sauce Signora
Cook two tablespoons of chopped, lean, raw ham in one-fourth cup butter until lightly browned, add one-fourth cup flour, onehalf teaspoon salt, and stir until well blended, then add one and onehalf cups of Brown Stock and one cup of Chili Sauce. Heat to boiling point, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and simmer ten minutes. This sauce may be strained or served without straining. Care must be taken that ham is not overcooked.
A quick brown roux sauce built on stock and bottled chili sauce, meant to go over cutlets, croquettes or leftover roast. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the stock is at hand.
- Chili sauce is not hot sauceIn American cookbooks of this era "Chili Sauce" means the thick, sweet-sour tomato relish sold beside ketchup — tomatoes, onion, green pepper, vinegar, sugar and mild spice. Using a modern thin, capsaicin-forward hot sauce in a one-cup quantity would wreck the dish.
- Brown stockA stock from browned beef bones and mirepoix, well reduced and unsalted. A good low-sodium beef stock stands in; if it is thin, reduce it by a third first, since the flour is doing the thickening but the stock supplies the body.
- The hinge: the hamThe final line matters. The ham is there for savour, not texture, and so small a quantity in hot butter will turn hard and bitter quickly if taken past colour. Add the flour as soon as the edges take on gold.
- Raw lean hamIn period usage "raw ham" generally means uncooked cured ham; prosciutto crudo or a similar dry-cured raw ham, finely chopped, will suit. Ordinary cooked deli ham can stand in, though with less depth, and needs even less time in the butter.
- Roux ratioA quarter cup each of butter and flour is a standard roux; against the recipe's 2½ cups of liquid that works out to a medium-bodied sauce rather than a thick one. Loosen with a little more stock if you want it thinner still.
- Adding the liquidAdd the stock and chili sauce gradually and whisk hard; the tomato solids in the chili sauce make lumps hard to spot until they set. The ten-minute simmer is what cooks out the raw flour taste, so do not cut it short.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon assumes unsalted stock and unsalted butter. With commercial stock and cured ham already in the pan, hold the salt until the end and taste.
- YieldAbout 2½ cups, enough for six to eight servings as an accompanying sauce.
Sauces given feminine Italian or French flourishes — Signora, Bordelaise, Piquante — appear often enough in American cookbooks of around 1900, when a household cook might be asked to turn plain stock and a few pantry staples into something with a name on it. The name here signals nothing more specific than the ham and tomato, both read as Italian by American kitchens of the period. One rough marker of the recipe's date is the cup of bottled chili sauce: commercially jarred chili sauce had become a standard American grocery item by the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the day used it as a shortcut seasoning that supplied acidity, sweetness and spice in one measured pour. The technique underneath is entirely classical, an espagnole thinned and sharpened, with the raw ham standing in for the traditional bit of salt pork or bacon in the roux.