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ITALIAN SAUCE, WHITE (another way)
Chop three shallots, a bit of garlic as big as a pea, and as many button-mushrooms as will fill a table-spoon twice. Put them with a breakfast-cupful of stock into a stewpan, add a large slice of ham, which should be minced, and simmer over a slow fire. In about half an hour add a quarter of a pint of bechamel; boil, and strain. Season with salt, half a tea-spoonful of sugar, the same of vinegar, and a squeeze of lemon-juice. The probable cost will be about 10d Sufficient for a dish.
A classic sauce italienne blanche: a mushroom-and-shallot infusion enriched with béchamel and sharpened at the end. The whole point is the half-hour simmer, which concentrates the stock and draws the mushroom and ham flavour into it before any dairy goes in.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in Victorian usage is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so treat it as about 1 cup of stock. The exact figure matters less than the reduction: by the time the béchamel goes in the liquid should be well down and tasting concentrated.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, so a scant two-thirds of a US cup of béchamel. Have it made and warm before you start, or it will chill the pan and thin the sauce.
- Mushrooms by the spoon"As many button-mushrooms as will fill a table-spoon twice" means two tablespoons of chopped mushroom — two or three small buttons. Chop them fine so they give up their flavour in thirty minutes.
- The slice of hamThis is a flavouring, not a garnish; it is strained out. Use a thick slice of a dry-cured ham such as prosciutto or a country ham, minced, about 1-2 oz. Ordinary wet-cured sandwich ham adds water and little else.
- A slow fireThe lowest possible simmer, barely trembling. Too brisk a boil in the first stage will reduce the stock to nothing before the ham and mushrooms have given anything up.
- StrainingPush the solids firmly against the sieve with a ladle rather than letting the sauce drip through. Much of the mushroom and ham flavour sits in what you would otherwise discard.
- The final seasoningHalf a teaspoon each of sugar and vinegar plus lemon is a deliberate sweet-sour lift against the ham's salt. Add the salt last and taste first — a cured ham simmered for half an hour may have salted the sauce already.
- YieldThe book says only "sufficient for a dish": enough to nap one dish of chicken, veal, eggs or white fish. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a spoonful of hot stock if it sets too firm.
"Italian sauce" in a nineteenth-century English kitchen has little to do with Italian cooking; it is sauce italienne, a fixture of the French repertoire by the early nineteenth century and inherited by every professional kitchen that followed. It came in two colours — brown, built on espagnole, and white, built as here on a light stock finished with béchamel or velouté — and both are essentially a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots turned into a sauce, with ham or bacon for depth. The name is generally traced to the mushroom-and-herb mixture rather than to any particular Italian dish, though the derivation is not settled. The costing in pence, a standing feature of the Dictionary, tells you the book was written for households running an accounts book as much as a kitchen.