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Venetian Sauce
Put half a pint of white sauce into a saucepan, and add a table-spoonful of mushroom juice. Stir it over the fire for ten minutes, lift it off, and let it cool a little. Beat the yolks of two eggs in a bowl, and with them a quarter of a pint of cream. Stir a little of the sauce into the mixture, and add it gradually to the rest, together with a little pepper and salt, a pinch of grated nutmeg, half a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar, and a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice. Stir the sauce briskly over the fire for five minutes, and add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. Pour it into the tureen, stir a small lump of butter into it, and serve.
An egg-and-cream enriched white sauce of the Victorian repertoire, closer to a thin liaison-bound velouté than anything served in Venice. The whole thing hinges on heat control after the yolks go in.
- Never let it boil after the yolksOnce the egg-and-cream liaison is stirred in, the sauce must stay below a simmer — around 175-180F is the working range. The "five minutes brisk over the fire" assumes a slow coal range and a saucepan you can lift clear; on a modern burner use low heat or a bowl over barely simmering water, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of white sauce is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups); a quarter pint of cream is 5 fl oz (a scant ⅔ cup). British books of the period used the 20-ounce imperial pint, so US cooks who assume 16 will end up with noticeably less sauce than intended.
- White sauceMost likely a basic flour-and-butter sauce — something on the order of 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of milk or light stock, cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Made with veal or chicken stock rather than milk it becomes a velouté, which suits this sauce better.
- Mushroom juiceNot a bottled product you will find now. Either the strained liquor from stewing mushrooms in a little butter and water, or a spoonful of mushroom ketchup, the dark spiced brew common in Victorian larders. Modern mushroom ketchup is saltier, so hold back on the salt if you use it.
- Temper properlyThe instruction to stir a little hot sauce into the yolks and cream first is the whole safeguard against scrambling. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, then return the lot to the pan off the direct heat.
- Lemon juice last, and gentlyLemon juice -- The recipe adds the lemon juice before the final five minutes over the fire. Acid plus hot dairy plus egg is where this sauce breaks, so it is safer to add the teaspoon with the pan off the heat and stir it through rather than cooking it in.
- The finishing butterWhisking a lump of cold butter into the sauce off the heat, in the tureen, gives gloss and body. Do it at the last moment; the sauce will not hold long and cannot be reheated.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups, enough for four to six. It is a sauce for poached or boiled chicken, veal, or white fish, and it wants to go to table immediately.
Sauce vénitienne belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire, where it is generally a white-wine or velouté-based sauce sharpened with tarragon vinegar and finished green with chervil, tarragon and parsley butter; the name was applied loosely in the classical kitchen and its origin is not settled. This version is that idea passed through an English kitchen: the wine and tarragon drop out, a spoonful of mushroom juice and an egg-and-cream liaison come in, and the parsley alone carries the colour. The mushroom juice is the giveaway of period and place. Mushroom ketchup was a household staple in Victorian Britain, a cheap savoury depth-charge kept by the bottle and used much as cooks now use soy or Worcestershire, and its appearance here marks the recipe as domestic English cookery borrowing a French name.