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Hot Piquante Sauce
Chop up fine two ounces of lean ham and a small piece of onion, add a little celery, the stalks of parsley, one clove, one-half tablespoon of pepper, and one-half bay-leaf. Pour over these ingredients a scant one-half cup of vinegar. Cover the saucepan and allow it to boil until it has consumed one-half. Put into another saucepan one-half cup of bouillon (or water in which you have dissolved one tablespoon of extract of beef). Allow it to boil, and then thicken with a teaspoon of potato flour which has been diluted in a little cold water. Drop this, little by little, into the saucepan until you have gained the required thickness for the sauce. Then pour in the boiled vinegar, passing it through cheese-cloth. Mix well together and add a teaspoon of French mustard, some capers, and some chopped-up pickles. Serve hot with meats or tongue. The pepper should predominate in this sauce.
A reduction-based sauce piquante built on vinegar rather than wine, thickened with potato starch instead of a roux. The whole point is the pepper, and the original says so.
- The half tablespoon of pepperThis is not a misprint but it is a lot for a sauce yielding well under a cup. Use coarsely cracked peppercorns rather than fine-ground powder, since they steep in the vinegar and are strained out; fine pepper will pass through the cheesecloth and turn the sauce gritty and harsh.
- Potato flourSold now as potato starch. Slake it in a tablespoon of cold water, add it to simmering stock off the boil, and stop as soon as it thickens and clears. Potato starch thins out if held at a hard boil or reheated for long, which is why the sauce should be finished just before serving.
- Extract of beefLiebig's or Bovril-type meat extract. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of it in half a cup of water; with modern concentrated beef base or a bouillon cube you will want considerably less, so add to taste. Taste before salting, since these are salty and the capers and pickles add more.
- Reduce by half, not to a glazeA scant half cup of vinegar boiled down to a quarter cup. Keep the pan covered as directed so the aromatics steep rather than scorch, and use a non-reactive pan.
- French mustardDijon, smooth rather than grainy. Add it at the end and off the heat; boiling mustard flattens its bite.
- PicklesAlmost certainly small sharp gherkins or cornichons rather than sweet pickle. Chop fine and add at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- Yield and servingRoughly three-quarters of a cup, to be served alongside boiled beef, braised tongue or cold roast meat sliced thin. Serve genuinely hot, as the starch body sets up dull once cooled.
Sauce piquante belongs to the family of vinegar-and-aromatic sauces that spread through nineteenth-century European kitchens from the French repertoire, and Italian cooks adopted it readily for boiled meats -- the natural partner to bollito misto, where a sharp condiment is what makes a plate of poached beef and tongue worth eating. Two details suggest something of this version's period. Potato starch as a thickener was lighter and clearer than a flour roux and quicker to make. And "extract of beef" points to the commercial meat concentrates that are generally said to have become household staples by the late 1800s, following Liebig's process for reducing carcass beef to a paste; a cook who had no stockpot going could now produce a sauce with a meaty base in minutes, which is exactly the promise implied by a book called Simple Italian Cookery.