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Russian Sauce
Dissolve a slice of butter in a small saucepan, and add two ounces of lean uncooked ham cut into dice, four minced shallots, a bay-leaf, a sprig of thyme, a spoonful of chopped parsley, two table-spoonfuls of scraped horse-radish, a dessert-spoonful of sugar, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, a wine-glassful of vinegar, and the same of light wine. Cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents steam gently for a quarter of an hour. Add half a pint of good white sauce and the yolks of four eggs. Stir the sauce over the fire till it begins to thicken, and strain through a sieve for use. The sauce must not boil after the eggs are added, and care must be taken not to put them into it until it is partially cooled. Time, about forty minutes to prepare the sauce.
A horseradish-and-wine reduction finished with egg yolks — closer to a rich sauce b rnaise in method than to anything in a modern Russian repertoire. Everything depends on how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the yolksLet the sauce drop below a simmer before the yolks go anywhere near it, then hold it at 170-180F while stirring, no higher. Boiling after the yolks are in will curdle it into scrambled egg in strands, and no amount of straining recovers the texture.
- A slice of butterThe book gives no measure; read it as roughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Enough to sweat the ham and shallots without frying them.
- Wine-glassfulUsually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, in period usage, though the measure was not fixed. So roughly a quarter cup each of vinegar and wine; wine vinegar or cider vinegar suits it better than distilled. "Light wine" most likely means a light dry white.
- Half a pint of white sauceAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1a cups. A plain bchamel or velout of pouring consistency, made with 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and the milk or stock.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. The sugar is there to round out the vinegar, not to sweeten the sauce noticeably.
- HorseradishTwo tablespoons of fresh scraped root. Jarred prepared horseradish is packed in vinegar and salt, so drain it and cut the vinegar in the recipe by a spoonful or so if you use it. Fresh root loses pungency fairly quickly once grated, and cooking dulls it further.
- The raw hamTwo ounces of lean "uncooked ham": period usage may mean raw cured ham rather than fresh meat, so fresh gammon or unsmoked bacon is one reading and uncooked cured ham another. It is aromatic only — it is strained out with the herbs and horseradish, so dice is fine and appearance does not matter.
- Steaming the aromaticsA quarter of an hour tightly covered over low heat. The point is infusion, not reduction; if the liquid cooks away you lose the body of the sauce, so keep the lid on and the flame very low.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/2 cups after straining. It would suit boiled or braised beef, tongue or boiled fish, though the recipe names no dish. Serve it as soon as it thickens; egg-bound sauces do not reheat and do not keep.
"Russian sauce" was a loose nineteenth-century label rather than a fixed formula, and British cookery of the period attached it to horseradish. Escoffier's later sauce russe is something else entirely, a mayonnaise enriched with caviar and lobster coral, which shows how unstable these national tags were. The warning that the sauce must be partially cooled before the yolks go in is the sort of instruction that only appears in books written for cooks who had ruined it at least once.