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.
A classic sauce italienne: a duxelles of shallot, mushroom and parsley reduced in white wine, let down with velouté and strong stock. The text is an alphabetical dictionary entry, and the printing has run several unrelated headwords into it, so read past the jam and the stray "Fam", "AM" and "Fardinière".
- The hinge: do not let it colourThe whole argument of the entry is that this sauce is white. Sweat the parsley, shallot and mushroom in the butter over gentle heat and reduce the wine hard, but the moment the butter or the shallot takes colour you have made a brown sauce and, as the author says, one barely distinguishable from several others.
- "Velvetdown"Almost certainly a misprint for Velvet, the book's English name for velouté — a white stock thickened with a blond roux. Two ladlefuls works out at roughly two cups, though the book nowhere fixes the size of a ladle.
- LadlefulsA kitchen ladle of the period held somewhere around half a pint, but the book never fixes it. Work to about 2 cups velouté to 1 cup broth and adjust; the proportion matters more than the absolute figure.
- Double brothStock reduced by half, or stock made a second time over fresh bones — a concentrated, gelatinous consommé, not the ready-made carton kind. Unsalted, since the sauce is boiled down again after it goes in.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Half a bottle of white wineAround 12–13 fl oz by Victorian bottling. Use something dry and unoaked; it is reduced almost to a glaze and any sweetness will concentrate.
- ShalotShallot. Half a tablespoon finely chopped is roughly one small shallot.
- "Throw up its scum"This is dépouiller: hold the pan half off the burner so the sauce simmers on one side only, driving fat and albumin to the cool side where they can be skimmed. Repeated skimming of this kind is what makes the sauce clear and glossy.
- YieldPerhaps 2 cups of finished sauce after skimming; the book gives no yield or serving count.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was published anonymously and is generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas, who borrowed the name of Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant for the title. It is arranged as a dictionary, which is why this entry sits between fragments on jam and jardinière, and its tone is that of a man settling arguments rather than teaching beginners — hence the opening complaint that the cookery books cannot agree whether sauce italienne is white or brown. Both versions were in fact current in nineteenth-century French practice, the brown built on espagnole and the white on velouté, and Carême's successors codified the pair; the constant in either case is the mushroom-and-shallot base known as duxelles, a preparation whose name goes back to seventeenth-century French cookery. The digression on strawberry jam, and the puff for W. Buszard of 350 Oxford Street, are characteristic: the book was as much a piece of London opinion journalism as a manual, and Buszard's was a real and well-known confectioner of the day.