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Lombarda Sauce
Put two tumblers of white roux and one of chicken jelly into a saucepan, reduce, and add three yolks of eggs mixed with two ounces of butter and the juice of one-half lemon. Before it boils take the saucepan off the fire, and add one tumbler of thick tomato sauce, strain, and just before serving add one tablespoon of sweet herbs minced fine. "Alla Panna" Sauce Melt one-half a pound of butter, add a little flour, salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Stir until thick, then add one pint of cream, a little chopped parsley, and heat for five minutes.
Two sauces have been run together in this entry: a rich egg-and-tomato velouté in the classical manner, and a short cream sauce tacked on at the end. Both are workable, but the measurements assume a kitchen that thought in glassfuls.
- The tumblerA tumbler in turn-of-the-century recipe books is a drinking glass, generally taken as 8 fl oz — one cup. The book gives no fixed measure, so treat it as approximate and judge the sauce by consistency rather than volume.
- "White roux" means the finished sauce"White roux" here must mean the finished sauce -- Two tumblers of actual roux — flour cooked in butter — would be a paste, not something you could reduce. The sense required by the instruction is a thin flour-thickened white sauce or velouté rather than the raw fat-and-flour mixture. Read it as two cups of a light flour-thickened chicken or milk-based sauce.
- Chicken jellyStrong chicken stock, reduced until it sets to a jelly when cold. Modern equivalent: a cup of well-reduced unsalted chicken stock, or a good demi-glace-style chicken base loosened with water. Bought broth is too weak to carry the sauce.
- The hinge: never let it boilThree yolks beaten with butter go into a hot sauce as a liaison. Much above roughly 180F the yolks are liable to curdle and the sauce breaks into grains. The recipe adds them to the pan and then says to take it off the fire before it boils; stir constantly, and return it only to a bare shiver if it needs more body.
- Holding and reheatingA yolk-thickened sauce will not survive a hard reheat and should not sit warm for long. Make it close to service and hold it no hotter than a bain-marie will keep it. If it must sit, expect to whisk it back together.
- Sweet herbsNot sugared anything — the period term for aromatic culinary seasoning herbs: parsley, chervil, tarragon, marjoram, a little thyme. The recipe already places them after straining and just before serving, which is where they belong.
- Thick tomato sauceMost likely a tomato purée cooked down until it mounds on a spoon rather than a modern seasoned pasta sauce, though the book does not say. Canned passata reduced by half gets you there.
- The "Alla Panna" sauceHalf a pound of butter to a pint of cream is very rich by current standards and the flour quantity is left to the cook — start with about two tablespoons for that volume. Five minutes over low heat is enough; cream held at a boil will separate.
- YieldNeither sauce gives one. The Lombarda's components come to something under a quart once the reduction is allowed for; the cream sauce rather less.
Sauces named for Lombardy in Italian cookbooks of this era are often taken to signal butter, cream and egg richness rather than any single documented dish — the northern kitchen defined against the oil-and-tomato south, though this one hedges by adding tomato at the end. The structure is straight out of the French repertoire that professional Italian cooks of the late nineteenth century were trained in: a velouté strengthened with meat jelly, finished with a yolk-and-butter liaison, strained, and pointed with lemon. That is why the terminology is French even when the name is not. The chicken jelly points the same way: it gives the cook concentrated body without a second thought.