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Milanese Sauce
Dissolve a lump of butter in a stewpan, and brown in it some button-mushrooms chopped finely, a couple of anchovies washed and boned, and three or four shallots, which, with the anchovies, should be cut small. Shake all well round the pan, and stir in a table-spoonful of browned flour, then moisten with half a pint or more of good stock, and add a wine-glassful of Marsala and caper-vinegar mixed, some capers, a small pinch of cayenne, a little salt, and the half of a tea-spoonful of made mustard. Simmer the sauce until the shallots, etc., are tender. Use as required for salmon cutlets, etc. Time, twenty minutes to simmer.
A brown sauce of the late-Victorian repertoire, thickened with browned flour and sharpened with anchovy, caper vinegar and Marsala. The balance rests on salt: anchovies, capers, caper vinegar and stock all carry it, so hold the added salt back until the end.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a low oven until nut-coloured, kept in a jar for brown sauces. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so a tablespoon into 10 fl oz of stock gives a light, pourable sauce rather than a coating one. Toast it yourself in a dry skillet over medium heat, stirring, until it smells like biscuit.'
- MeasuresThe half pint is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or 1¼ US cups. A wine-glassful is conventionally about 2 fl oz, here split between Marsala and caper vinegar, so roughly 2 tablespoons of each. A "lump of butter" is unquantified; an ounce or so is a reasonable reading.
- AnchoviesThe washing and boning assumes whole salt-cured anchovies. Modern oil-packed fillets need neither: two or three, chopped, are the equivalent. They will dissolve into the butter almost entirely, which is the intention.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard, not mustard powder. An English or Dijon paste suits; half a teaspoon is enough to register without reading as mustard sauce.
- MarsalaUse dry (secco) Marsala. Sweet Marsala pushes the sauce toward the cloying, which the caper vinegar then has to fight.
- Caper vinegarThe brine from a jar of capers. If yours are salt-packed, substitute white wine vinegar and rinse the capers before adding them.
- SimmeringTwenty minutes is the recipe's own time, and the point is not thickening but softening the shallots and mushrooms and taking the raw edge off the vinegar. Keep it at a bare simmer; a hard boil will drive off the Marsala.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1½ cups, depending on how much stock is used. Season at the very end. No straining is called for.
Nineteenth-century English kitchens attached the name "Milanese" fairly loosely to dishes with an Italian accent, usually meaning tomato, Parmesan or a wine like Marsala rather than anything cooked in Milan; the fortified wine itself comes from Sicily, and reached Britain in quantity through the English merchant houses established at Marsala in the late eighteenth century. What this sauce really represents is the standard Victorian brown-sauce method — browned flour, good stock, an acid and a salty savoury note — dressed in a foreign name for the menu card. The anchovy-and-caper combination is often said to have been a British fixture long before it was Italian here, plausibly descended from the eighteenth-century fish sauces and store ketchups that flavoured almost everything served with salmon or turbot. However the book itself arranges the matter, this is in effect a teaching sauce: once a cook could brown a roux, moisten it and balance salt against vinegar, a dozen named variations followed from the same pan.