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Agro Dolce Sauce
Take two tablespoons of sugar (brown or white), one-half a cup of currants, a quarter of a bar of grated chocolate, one tablespoon of chopped candied orange, one of lemon-peel, one of capers, and one cup of vinegar. Mix well together and let soak for two hours; pour it over venison or veal, and simmer for ten minutes.
Bechamel Sauce No. 1 Put two ounces of butter and two tablespoons of flour into a saucepan and stir for five minutes. Pour one and one-half pints of boiling milk gradually in, beating well with a whisk. Add some nutmeg, a few peppercorns, a pinch of salt, and some chopped mushrooms. Cook for one-quarter of an hour, and rub through a fine sieve.
Bechamel Sauce No. 2 Mix three tablespoons of butter and three of flour to a smooth paste, put some peppercorns, one-half an onion, one-half a carrot sliced, a small piece of mace, two teacups of white stock, a pinch of salt and of grated nutmeg, in a stew-pan; simmer for one-half an hour, stirring often, then add one teacup of cream; boil at once, and strain and serve.
Tomato Sauce No. 1 Take ten fresh tomatoes, remove the skins, cut them up; put them into a saucepan and boil them until soft. Then pass them through a sieve. Put their juice into a saucepan with one heaping tablespoon of butter or one-half tablespoon of good lard, salt and pepper, and boil again, adding water if the sauce becomes too thick. This sauce can be kept in a bottle for several days. It can be used for macaroni, etc., in place of the tomato paste. Tomato Sauce No. 2 Mince one-quarter of an onion, one-half a stalk of celery, a few leaves of sweet basil, and a bunch of parsley up fine. Add one-half cup of olive-oil, a pinch of salt and one of pepper, and cut eight or nine tomatoes into slices. Boil until the sauce is as thick as cream, stirring occasionally, then strain through a sieve and serve.
Tomato Sauce No. 3 Take four pounds of tomatoes, cut them in two, and put them into a two-quart saucepan with two wine glasses of water, two saltspoons of salt, one of pepper, cover the saucepan, and boil for forty minutes, stirring often to prevent burning; then strain. Make a roux in another saucepan with one ounce of butter and three-quarters of an ounce of flour. Cook for three minutes, mixing well. Take roux off the fire, and pour the tomatoes into it a little at a time, stirring to keep it smooth. Add two wineglasses of stock, put on the fire, and cook for twenty minutes, stirring all the time.
Five sauces run together on one page: a Sicilian-style sweet-sour, two bechamels and three tomato sauces. The measurements are early-twentieth-century American domestic ones, and a couple of the instructions are incomplete as printed.
- A quarter bar of chocolateGenuinely ambiguous. Baking chocolate of the period was commonly sold in cakes or bars scored into ounce squares, though sizes varied, so a quarter bar may have been roughly an ounce; start with about 1/2 oz of unsweetened chocolate for the quantity of sauce here and taste before adding more. It should read as depth and colour, not as dessert.
- Agrodolce is a finishing sauceThe two-hour soak is doing the real work: it softens the currants and dissolves the sugar so the vinegar loses its rawness. Ten minutes of simmering over already-cooked venison or veal is all it needs; longer and the vinegar reduces to something harsh.
- Vinegar strengthA cup of vinegar to two tablespoons of sugar is sharp by modern taste. Vinegar of the period varied in strength and may have been weaker than today's standard 5 percent; start with red wine vinegar cut with a little water or stock and adjust the sugar upward if it bites.
- Teacups, wineglasses and saltspoonsA teacup is about 3/4 cup, a wineglass about 2 fl oz (so two wineglasses is 1/2 cup), a saltspoon about 1/4 teaspoon. Bechamel No. 2 therefore uses roughly 1 1/2 cups stock and 3/4 cup cream.
- Bechamel No. 2 has a gapThe butter-and-flour paste is mixed at the start and then never explicitly added. Whisk it into the simmered, strained stock in small pieces (a beurre manié) before the cream goes in, or make a roux first and build the sauce on it as in No. 1.
- Bechamel No. 1 timingA quarter of an hour of gentle cooking is right, not excessive: it cooks out the raw flour and lets the nutmeg, peppercorns and mushrooms infuse. Keep it barely bubbling and stir the bottom, or the milk will catch.
- Tomato Sauce No. 2 uses a lot of oilHalf a cup of olive oil to eight or nine tomatoes gives the loose, oil-slicked sauce common in Italian home cooking of the period. It is correct as written, but the sauce must be stirred and reduced properly or it will separate.
- Keeping the bottled sauce"Can be kept in a bottle for several days" assumed a cool larder and daily use. Refrigerate it, keep it under a film of oil if you like, and use within four or five days. It is not a preserved sauce and should not be treated as one.
- YieldsThe agrodolce makes enough for four to six portions of meat. Bechamel No. 1 gives about 3 cups, No. 2 about 2 cups, and the tomato sauces roughly 2 to 3 cups each, enough to dress a pound of pasta.
Agrodolce means simply sour-sweet, and the pairing of vinegar with sugar or honey and dried fruit is one of the oldest surviving threads in Italian cooking, generally traced back through medieval and Renaissance kitchens to Arab influence in Sicily. The grated chocolate is the striking detail here: after cacao reached Europe it was sometimes used as a savoury seasoning, and it survives in that role in a handful of Italian and Spanish sauces, where it darkens and rounds a sauce rather than sweetening it. That this recipe sits on the same page as two bechamels shows what the book is doing — Simple Italian Cookery was written for American households in the early 1900s, when Italian food was still being introduced to English-speaking cooks alongside the French repertoire they were expected to already know, and the three plain tomato sauces at the end were probably the most genuinely novel thing on the page for its first readers.