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Sauces and Garnishes: Tarragon
D'Uxelles-white sauce with chopped ham, mushrooms, parsley, etc. Estragon (Tarragon) - white stock with Tarragon vinegar, tarragon, etc.
Fenouil (Fennel) - melted - butter sauce with chopped fennel.
Financière-brown sauce with wine, mushroom catsup, etc.
Fines-herbes-brown sauce with chopped mushrooms, shallots and parsley. Fouettée-sweet whip sauce of yolks of eggs, sugar and wine.
Fumet de gibier-a brown game sauce with onions, wine, etc.
Genevoise-brown sauce with wine, anchovy, chopped parsley, etc. This sauce is generally used for freshwater fish.
Groseilles vertes-green gooseberries with butter, breadcrumbs, etc. For mackerel.
Hollandaise - yolks of eggs and butter with vinegar, etc.
Homard (Lobster) melted-butter sauce, with lobster spawn and the flesh in small pieces.
Hubert-a game sauce with wine and chopped truffles.
Huîtres (Oyster) - oysters in white or brown sauce.
An alphabetical list of sauces, and the key to the rest of the book. Almost every dish elsewhere in these pages is named for a sauce; this is where the sauce is finally defined.
- “Melted-butter sauce” is not melted butterIn English kitchens of this period melted butter meant a thickened butter sauce — flour, butter and liquid, worked smooth. Fennel sauce and lobster sauce here are both built on it. Pour warm butter over your fish instead and you will have a different dish, and a thinner one.
- Mushroom catsupThe seasoning in Financière sauce. It is a thin, dark, intensely salty liquor drawn from salted mushrooms, not a thick tomato condiment. It is still made commercially, if rarely stocked; soy or a concentrated mushroom extract does the same work of adding savour and colour without bulk.
- Lobster spawn means the coralSauce homard takes its colour from the roe, which is almost black in a raw lobster and turns scarlet when cooked. Pounded into butter and stirred in at the end, it colours and thickens at once. Paprika and tomato purée are what people reach for now, and neither tastes of lobster.
- One sauce comes with its fish attachedGroseilles vertes, green gooseberries with butter and crumbs, “for mackerel.” It is the only entry here that names its partner, and the logic has outlived the sauce: a sharp fruit against an oily fish is still why gooseberry and rhubarb turn up beside mackerel.
- Fouettée is a dessert sauce in a savoury listYolks, sugar and wine whipped over heat — a sabayon, filed between fennel and Financière because the chapter is an alphabet rather than a menu. Worth noticing before you ladle it over a fish.
- Genevoise is for freshwater fishA brown sauce with wine, anchovy and parsley, and the page says what it is for. Brown sauce on fish looks wrong to a modern eye, but river fish were often cooked in red wine, and the pairing is deliberate rather than careless.
A list like this is what made the rest of the book possible. A kitchen kept two stockpots, one brown and one white, and from them a trained cook could produce twenty differently named dishes in an evening by changing a handful of chopped something at the last minute. That is the economy the whole menu system rests on: the expensive part — the stock, the reduction, the days of bones — was made once, and the variety that appeared on the card was added in the final five minutes.