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Roman Sauce
Cut one pound of veal and half a pound of ham into dice, and put them into a saucepan with two legs of a fowl, three or four carrots, four onions, two bay-leaves, three cloves, a little basil, half a pound of butter, and a little salt; put into a saucepan and set on rather a brisk fire. In the meanwhile, pound the yolks of twelve hard-boiled eggs to a paste, and stir them into the above till the butter is entirely melted; then pour in by degrees a quart of cream. Set the pan again on the fire for half an hour, stirring all the time; if the sauce be too thick, add more cream or milk. When sufficiently done, strain through a tamis. Probable cost, 4s.
This is a Victorian compound sauce built on the older model of extracting flavour from meat into butter and cream, thickened with pounded egg yolk rather than flour. It scales badly in a modern kitchen and needs a gentle hand at the end.
- Keep it below a simmer once the cream is inThe pounded yolks are already cooked, so what boiling threatens is the cream splitting or catching on the base. Hold it at a bare tremble, stir continuously, and pull it off the heat the moment it coats the back of a spoon.
- "Rather a brisk fire" means sweating, not browning"Rather a brisk fire" -- the book says brisk, but the finished sauce is a pale one, so it is probably best read as sweating rather than browning: the meat and vegetables giving up their juices into the melting butter without colouring. Medium-low heat with the lid ajar does it. If the butter starts to fry the ham, the finished sauce will taste of frizzled bacon.
- Legs of a fowlTwo chicken drumsticks or thighs, bone in, used purely for flavour and gelatine. They are strained out at the end, so quality matters less than the bone.
- TamisA tammy was a fine woollen or worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force the sauce through. A fine chinois or a conical sieve lined with damp muslin, pressed with a ladle, gives the same result.
- YieldA pound of veal, half a pound of ham, half a pound of butter and a quart of cream produce something like a litre and a half of very rich sauce — enough for twenty or more servings. Quartering the recipe is sensible, and the egg yolks come down to three.
- The egg-yolk pasteHard-boiled yolks pounded smooth are the thickener here, standing in for a roux. Sieve them rather than mashing, or you will get grains that survive even the tamis.
- Salt and the hamHalf a pound of cured ham plus "a little salt" will carry the seasoning a long way. Salt only at the end, after straining.
- Probable cost, 4sFour shillings was a substantial sum in the 1870s, on the order of a day's wage for a skilled worker and rather more than that for a labourer. The costings in Cassell's give some indication of which recipes were aimed at households with a cook.
The name is confusing to modern eyes: the sauce romaine of later French practice is a dark sweet-sour sauce with caramel, currants and pine nuts served with game, and has nothing in common with this pale cream-and-egg preparation. Sauce names in nineteenth-century English books were often borrowed loosely from French manuals and applied to whatever the compiler had to hand, and geographical labels rarely indicated any real connection to the place. What the recipe does show is an older method of thickening -- pounded hard-boiled yolk, a technique that reaches back through medieval and Renaissance cookery -- sitting alongside the flour-based veloutés that would largely displace it.