Italian Sauce
Most of the cookery books are curiously uncertain about this sauce. Some make it white, some make it brown, and others make it both white and brown. It is a white sauce. People may say that they have a right to reproduce it in brown if they please. So they have; but the result in that case is so nearly allied to Fam some other brown sauces that it seems absurd to make a confusion of names for a trifling difference.
Put into a saucepan a tablespoonful of parsley, half one of shalot, and another of mushroom-all finely chopped; half a bottle of white wine; and butter about the size of an egg. Put it on the fire to boil and reduce it well, but without browning it. Then add two ladlefuls of Velvetdown and one of double broth. Set it on the fire to boil and to throw up its scum. Remove scum and grease, and it is ready.
AM-one of the most unfortunate words ever introduced into the English language. Of foreign, probably Oriental origin, it has been only too easy to confound it in meaning with the English word to jam or crush together. The English make their conserves of fruit into a jam-something pressed hard together; which they sometimes also most appropriately call-a cheese. They have no notion, for example, in making strawberry jam, of keeping the berries separate. They do not understand a medium between smashing the fruit and jamming it together into a solid cheese on the one hand, and on the other preserving it like bottled fruits in a thin syrup. In the one case the flavour of the conserve is overdone-in the other underdone; and no justice is done to the fruit. There might be some excuse for such a treatment of raspberries, which easily break and run together. Nobody who has eaten the Scotch or the French conserve of strawberries, where the fruit is kept whole, will care to look at the English jam.
Every rule has its exception. There is a good strawberry jam to be found in London. The maker's name is oddly spelt-Buszard. There is a curious indecision which Fardinière interests the philosophic mind in that s which fears to duplicate itself, and that z which refuses to vanish altogether. There is no indecision in the jam, however-and I hand down to the admiration of posterity the immortal name of W. Buszard, 350, Oxford Street-the only place in London where strawberries are decently preserved.