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ITALIAN SAUCE (Rouge et Blanche)
Put the following ingredients into a stewpan:--Two spoonfuls of chopped mushrooms, one of parsley, half a shallot, the same of bay-leaf; add pepper and salt to taste. Stew them gently, with just enough Espagnole sauce to moisten them, and thin to a proper consistency with good strong broth. Strain for use. For sauce blanche, moisten with veloute in the place of Espagnole.
A compound sauce built on one of the two mother sauces of the French repertoire, given here in the shorthand a professional kitchen of the 1890s would have understood. The whole point is the mushroom-and-herb base, so treat that with more care than the terse wording suggests.
- The hinge: cook the mushrooms dryThe hinge: the mushrooms carry the sauce -- Chopped mushrooms release a good deal of water. The recipe has you stew them from the start with only just enough Espagnole to moisten, so keep the heat gentle and the moistening sparing, and let the liquid cook down before you thin with broth.
- "Two spoonfuls"The size is not specified; in cookery of this period an unqualified spoonful is often taken to mean a tablespoon. Read it as roughly 2 tablespoons of finely chopped mushroom to 1 of parsley, and scale to the quantity of sauce you are finishing.
- Espagnole and velouteEspagnole is the brown mother sauce -- brown roux, brown stock, tomato and mirepoix, long-simmered. Veloute is the pale equivalent, blond roux with white veal or chicken stock. Ready-made versions are rarely worth using, so make one, or substitute a well-reduced, lightly thickened brown or white stock and accept that it will be lighter in body.
- Rouge et blancheThe two names are the same sauce in two colours: italienne rouge finished with Espagnole, italienne blanche with veloute. Choose according to what it is going on -- brown for roast and braised meats, white for poultry, veal and eggs.
- "Half a shallot, the same of bay-leaf"Half a shallot, finely chopped, and half a bay leaf. Since the sauce is strained, there is no need to chop the bay at all -- drop the half leaf in whole and lift it out before straining.
- Straining, and what it costs youStraining removes the mushroom and parsley entirely and leaves only their flavour; other versions of sauce italienne keep the mushroom in as a garnish instead. If you leave it in, add the parsley at the very end so it stays green.
- Consistency"Proper consistency" means it coats the back of a spoon and runs off cleanly, leaving a thin film. Add the broth a little at a time; it is far easier to thin than to reduce back.
Sauce italienne is one of the standard small sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, and its name is usually said to refer not to Italy's own cooking but to the French habit of labelling a mushroom-and-shallot preparation as "in the Italian manner". The mushroom base is essentially a duxelles, the fine mushroom hash generally credited to the household of the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose cook was Francois Pierre La Varenne -- an attribution repeated everywhere and documented nowhere very firmly. Fuller versions of the sauce begin by reducing white wine with the mushrooms and shallot before the mother sauce goes in; Cassell's, compiling for British households rather than professional brigades, strips the method to its bones and assumes a stockpot of Espagnole or veloute already standing on the range. That assumption is the real historical marker here: this is a recipe written for a kitchen where the foundation sauces were made in quantity, and finishing a sauce meant flavouring a ladleful of something that already existed.