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GENEVESE SAUCE (for Salmon, Trout, etc.)
Put two ounces of fresh butter into a stewpan. Let it melt, then add three ounces of lean ham, cut into small pieces, a sprig of thyme, a sprig of parsley, a scraped carrot, a bay-leaf, a blade of mace, and a small onion stuck with three cloves. Stir the ingredients quickly over the fire, then mix in, very smoothly, one table-spoonful of flour. Beat the paste with a wooden spoon, and pour in by degrees one pint of good stock. Let all stew gently for an hour. Strain, and return the sauce to the pan, thickening it with a little flour and butter, and adding a large wine-glass-full of white wine, and a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice. Season with salt and cayenne. Let the sauce boil after the thickening is added, and serve as hot as possible. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pint. Sufficient for three or four pounds of fish.
A brown-stock reduction sauce built on a ham-and-aromatic base, finished with wine and lemon. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures need translating.
- Wine-glass and dessert-spoonA wine-glass in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, and a "large" one somewhat more; a dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons. The "little flour and butter" for the second thickening is unmeasured: a teaspoon or so of each, kneaded cold into a beurre manie, is a reasonable reading.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried aril of nutmeg, not ground mace. If you only have ground, use a pinch and expect a slightly cloudier sauce, since it cannot be strained out.
- The ham mattersThree ounces of lean dry-cured ham is the backbone of the flavour. Supermarket wet-cured cooking ham is much milder and saltier at once; prosciutto trimmings, speck, or a piece of country ham are closer to what the book assumes.
- StockThe recipe says only "good stock" and does not specify which; a well-bodied brown veal or beef stock suits it. A thin cube-based broth will give a sauce that tastes of flour and wine and little else; reduce a supermarket stock by a third first if that is all you have.
- Keep the hour gentleThe one-hour stew should be a bare simmer with the lid off-set. Boiling it hard drives off the wine-less aromatics, clouds the sauce, and scorches the flour paste on the bottom of the pan.
- Do boil after thickeningThe instruction to boil once the thickening goes in is deliberate: raw flour tastes pasty, and a minute or two at the boil cooks it out and sets the final consistency. Note that the recipe adds the lemon juice along with the wine, before that boil.
- White wine, not redCassell's version is a white-wine sauce, which suits salmon and trout. A dry, unoaked white works best; classical French génevoise uses red, so do not be surprised by other recipes calling for it.
- YieldAbout a pint, enough for three to four pounds of fish, or six to eight portions. It reheats without splitting but will thicken on standing, so slacken with a spoonful of stock.
The name is often traced to Geneva, though a derivation from Genoa has long been argued as well, and in the French repertoire sauce génevoise (sometimes spelled genevoise, and frequently confused with the Italian genoise, of Genoa) is a wine-based fish sauce built on a mirepoix with ham, most often with red wine and traditionally attached to salmon. Cassell's, writing for an English household in the later nineteenth century, keeps the ham-and-aromatic foundation but swaps in white wine. The recipe is really a lesson in method rather than a single dish: brown the aromatics in butter, bind with flour, moisten with stock, stew, strain, then finish with wine, acid and a second thickening. That sequence is the ancestor of most of the compound sauces in the nineteenth-century kitchen, and the costing of 1s. 6d. per pint is a reminder that good stock and a piece of ham were considered a real expense in a household budget.