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Italian Sauce, Brown
INGREDIENTS for sauce for small dish. A few chopped mushrooms and shalots, ½ pint of stock, 1/21 glass of Madeira, the juice of 1/2 lemon, 1/2 teaspoonful of pounded sugar, 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Put the stock into a stewpan with the mushrooms, shalots and madeira and stew gently for 1/4 hour, then add the remaining ingredients, and let them just boil. When the sauce is done enough, put it in another stewpan and warm it in a bain marie. The mushrooms should not be chopped long before they are wanted, as they will then become black. become black.
TIME. hour.
A small brown sauce built on stock, Madeira and a fine mince of mushroom and shallot — essentially a quick duxelles finished in a reduction. The printed fractions have been mangled by the typesetting, so read them with care.
- The Madeira measureThe stock is half a pint, as printed. The Madeira is given as "1/21 glass," which is garbled; half a glass is the likeliest reading, and the recipe gives no yield to check it against.
- Stock means brown stockAn Italian sauce called "brown" assumes a well-reduced beef or veal stock, ideally something with body from roasted bones. Commercial low-sodium beef stock will need reducing by half first, or the finished sauce stays thin and tastes flat.
- ShalotsShallots. Chop them as finely as the mushrooms — this is a sauce with no straining step, so the texture of the mince is the texture of the sauce.
- Chop the mushrooms at the last momentThe note about blackening is the one instruction that matters. Cut mushroom flesh oxidises within minutes and turns the sauce grey-brown and muddy rather than clear. Have everything else ready, then chop.
- Don't over-reduce the MadeiraA quarter hour of gentle stewing is enough to soften the shallot and concentrate the wine. Once the lemon, sugar and parsley go in, bring it just to the boil and stop — prolonged cooking dulls the parsley and drives off the Madeira aroma the sauce exists for.
- Bain marieA heatproof bowl over barely simmering water, or the lowest setting on the hob with the pan sitting off-centre. The point is holding the sauce at serving heat without further reduction or a boil.
- StewpanAny small heavy saucepan. The recipe directs the sauce into a second pan for holding; with modern cookware you can simply move the pan to the bain marie.
- YieldDescribed only as "sauce for small dish"; the quantities suggest well under a cupful after the stewing.
Sauce italienne belongs to the French classical repertoire rather than to Italy; the origin of its name is not settled, though it is often linked to the mushroom-and-shallot mince, the duxelles. Carême and later Escoffier both codified it in brown and white versions, the brown built on espagnole or demi-glace, the white on a velouté, and Mrs Beeton's book carries the pair over. The Madeira, the lemon juice and the pinch of pounded sugar are characteristic of Victorian sauce-making, where a sharp-sweet balance was expected to lift a heavy reduced stock. The "average cost, 8d" line is a reminder of what these books were for: household manuals as much as cookbooks, priced per dish so a mistress could check the kitchen accounts.