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Milanaise Sauce
3 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon capers 3 tablespoons chopped 3 tablespoons flour mushrooms 1½ cups stock 1 teaspoon anchovy paste salt cayenne 2 tablespoons wine Cook mushrooms, capers and anchovy in butter five minutes. Add flour, stock, seasonings, and simmer one half hour.
Add wine and serve.
The ingredient column has been jumbled by the original two-column setting; read it as 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons chopped mushrooms, 1 tablespoon capers, 1 teaspoon anchovy paste, 1½ cups stock, salt, cayenne, and 2 tablespoons wine.
- The hingeEqual butter and flour thickening 1½ cups of stock gives a sauce of about medium body, and the half-hour simmer will reduce it further as well as cooking out the raw flour taste. Stir it down often and keep a little extra stock at hand to thin it back to coating consistency.
- Cook the mushrooms first, brieflyFive minutes in butter is enough to drive off their water and concentrate flavour before the flour goes in. Chop them fine so they disperse rather than sit as lumps.
- Anchovy pasteThe paste is salty in itself. Add the salt only at the end, after the reduction, or the sauce will overshoot.
- CapersDrain and rinse brined capers; salt-packed ones need a longer soak. Half an hour of simmering will soften them considerably.
- WineUnspecified, but a dry white or a dry Madeira suits this sauce. The recipe adds it at the very end, just before serving.
- StockUse a brown veal or beef stock for meat, a light chicken stock for vegetables. Commercial broth is thinner and saltier than homemade, another reason to season last.
- YieldSomewhat over a cup after the half-hour reduction, enough for four or so servings over veal cutlets, sweetbreads, or boiled vegetables.
"Milanaise" in the older Franco-American sauce vocabulary is a loose label rather than a fixed formula: it generally signals mushrooms and something sharp and savoury, and in classical cookery it is more often attached to a garnish of ham, tongue and mushrooms in tomato-tinted sauce than to a brown sauce like this one. Anchovy paste and capers turn up constantly in American sauce chapters of this era. Lowney's book, published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, is best known for its confectionery, but it was built out to a full general manual, sauce chapter included.