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Vinaigrette
1 tablespoon vinegar 4 tablespoons olive oil 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 shallot 2 sprigs parsley 2 chives 2 sprigs chervil Chop the parsley, shallots, chives and chervil; place in a bowl with seasonings and vinegar, stir together, then add the oil slowly. Mix well together and serve.
Garnishing a la Provencale, No. 1 2 cups mushrooms sliced 2 cups Spanish Sauce 1 cup Tomato Sauce 1 small onion chopped 1 clove of garlic 2 sprigs parsley 1 tablespoon butter Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon lemon juice Chop onion and garlic and fry in butter. Add the sliced mushrooms and fry a little longer. Add the Spanish and Tomato Sauce and simmer for five minutes. Add the red pepper, chopped parsley and lemon juice, and serve. Garnishings a la Provencale, No. 2 2 white onions 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup White Sauce No. 2 Few grains pepper 1/2 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1/4 teaspoon salt Peel and mince fine the onions, scald with boiling water, drain well and brown lightly with the butter in an omelet pan. Rub the spoon with a freshly cut clove of garlic; combine the white sauce, onion, lemon juice, seasonings and cheese, stir well until it comes to the boil and set away to cool.
Three fish accompaniments run together on one page: a cold herb vinaigrette and two hot Provençale garnishes built on the book's own mother sauces. Read them as three separate preparations, not one sequence.
- The vinaigrette ratioOne part vinegar to four parts oil, which is richer than the modern 1:3 standard. If the vinegar is a sharp distilled or wine vinegar, the balance holds; with a mild rice or cider vinegar the dressing will taste flat and needs another teaspoon or two.
- Adding the oil slowlyThe point of trickling the oil into the seasoned vinegar is that the salt dissolves in the vinegar first and the chopped shallot and herbs help hold a loose emulsion. Whisk hard as you pour; it will still separate within an hour, so mix it near serving time.
- Herb quantities"2 chives" means two individual blades, not two tablespoons chopped. Chervil is the one herb here likely to be missing from a supermarket: it tastes of mild anise and parsley, and a pinch of tarragon plus extra parsley stands in for it acceptably.
- Spanish SauceMost likely the book's name for sauce espagnole, the brown sauce of veal or beef stock thickened with browned roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato; the fact that Tomato Sauce is listed separately points that way. A good reduced brown stock thickened lightly will do the same work in Garnishing No. 1.
- White Sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces in books of this period usually run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is probably the medium bechamel, on the order of a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk. Half a cup is a small amount, so the finished onion garnish is a thick paste rather than a pouring sauce.
- Rubbing the spoon with garlicAn old device for the faintest possible garlic flavour, used where a chopped clove would dominate. It is not a substitute for the whole garlic clove in No. 1, where the garlic is meant to be tasted.
- Omelet panA shallow, sloped-sided skillet. Any wide frying pan works; the shape matters only because minced onion browns better spread thin than heaped.
- YieldsThe vinaigrette makes about a third of a cup, enough to dress cold poached fish or shellfish for four. Garnishing No. 1 makes something close to four cups, enough for a baked or grilled fish for six; No. 2 makes about a cup and is used in spoonfuls, spread on fish or in a shell before glazing.
The Provencale garnishes here are shorthand from the classical French repertoire that dominated American hotel and better home cooking around 1900: mushrooms, tomato, garlic and onion signalled the south of France, and any kitchen that could produce espagnole and bechamel could improvise a dozen named sauces from them. Vinaigrette itself takes its name from vinaigre, and in French practice of this period it was as much a sauce for cold cooked fish, brains or calf's head as a salad dressing, which may be why it sits among the fish accompaniments rather than the salads. The presence of chervil is a marker of how closely the book follows French usage; it was a standard fines herbes component then and is generally traced to that quartet with parsley, chives and tarragon.