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Italian Sauce
Fry six mushrooms and two shallots, finely minced, in an ounce of butter; when brown add a quarter of a pint of good stock, and half a pint of Spanish sauce. When the latter is not at hand, take half a pint of stock, and a glass of champagne or other light wine. Probable cost, exclusive of wine, 1s. Time to simmer, after the stock is added, twenty minutes. The above ingredients are sufficient to fill a sauce tureen.
ITALIAN SAUCE FOR BOILED BEEF. (See BEEF, BOILED, ITALIAN SAUCE FOR.)
A short compound sauce built on a brown base, of the kind Victorian kitchens kept ready in a stockpot. The measures are imperial and the key ingredient is one you now have to make or substitute.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole: brown stock thickened with a browned roux, often with mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Nothing in a jar corresponds to it; a well-reduced brown stock lightly thickened is the nearest practical stand-in.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (about 140 ml) and half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 285 ml), since the imperial pint runs to 20 fl oz. A "glass" of wine is an unstandardised measure; treat it as a wineglassful, a few fluid ounces.
- The mince mattersSix mushrooms and two shallots chopped fine, not sliced. The sauce is never strained here, so the texture depends entirely on how small the pieces are.
- Fry them dry, then brownMushrooms release water before they colour. Let that water cook off in the ounce of butter and only then take the mixture to a real brown, or the finished sauce will taste flat and pale.
- Twenty minutes of simmeringThe recipe gives no reduction target, but a simmer of that length will thicken and concentrate the sauce as well as cook the aromatics; judge it by consistency rather than by the clock.
- The wine versionWith no espagnole to hand, stock plus wine gives a thin sauce. Reduce it harder, or mount it with a knob of cold butter off the heat, since there is no roux to carry it.
- Yield and seasoningThe quantities come to about three-quarters of a pint, which the recipe says is enough to fill a sauce tureen; it gives no number of servings. No salt is specified, so the stock is assumed to be seasoned -- taste at the end.
- The cost note"Probable cost, exclusive of wine, 1s." is shilling-and-pence pricing for a Victorian household budget and has no bearing on shopping today.
Sauce italienne is one of the small brown derivative sauces codified in nineteenth-century French professional kitchens, where a batch of espagnole sat on the stove and cooks spun off a dozen named sauces from it by adding a garnish and a wine. The classic version is a duxelles of mushroom and shallot moistened with white wine, sometimes with lean ham, finished with chopped herbs; Cassell's has trimmed it to the essentials for a domestic reader and offered a wine-and-stock shortcut for households that did not keep espagnole. How the sauce came by its name is not established, and this entry sits in the dictionary alongside a cross-reference to another Italian sauce served with boiled beef, a reminder that sauce names in Victorian cookery books were far from settled.