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Carrot (Lean raw ham peppercorns)
Lean raw ham 12 peppercorns 2 cloves } Sauce à l'Italienne 2 tablespoons each, finely chopped Sprig marjoram 2 tablespoons butter 2½ tablespoons flour 1 cup Brown Stock 1¼ cups white wine ½ tablespoon finely chopped parsley Cook first six ingredients with butter five minutes, add flour, and stir until well browned; then add gradually stock and wine. Strain, reheat, and after pouring around fish sprinkle with parsley.
A classic brown wine sauce for fish, built on a mirepoix-and-ham base and a dark roux. The typography has suffered in transcription, so the ingredient list needs reading before you start.
- What the first six ingredients areThe bracketed list is damaged. The visible items are carrot (from the heading), lean raw ham, 12 peppercorns, 2 cloves and a sprig of marjoram; a sixth ingredient, very likely onion, has been lost in transcription. The "2 tablespoons each, finely chopped" appears to apply to the chopped vegetables and the ham. The 12 peppercorns and 2 cloves are counts, not spoonfuls.
- Roux proportionThe wine measure was checked against the printed page and reads 1¼ cups. The 2½ tablespoons flour against 2 tablespoons butter makes a dry, tight roux; the proportion stands, since the vegetables and ham give up moisture and fat as they cook, so there is no need to reduce the flour to match the butter.
- Raw hamLean raw ham here means uncooked cured ham, the sort sold now as prosciutto crudo end pieces or a raw gammon trimming. Diced pancetta is the closest easy substitute; a cooked deli ham will not give the same savour.
- Browning the flourThe hinge of the sauce. After the five minutes of cooking, the flour needs steady stirring over moderate heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of an old penny; the book gives no time for this. Under-browned, the sauce tastes pasty; scorched, it turns bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Adding the liquidThe recipe says only that the stock and wine go in gradually. Modern practice would be to add them off the boil, whisking, so the roux does not seize into lumps, and to let the sauce simmer before straining; the book specifies no simmering time.
- Brown StockThe book's own Brown Stock is a long-simmered beef stock. A good unsalted beef stock works; season only after reduction, since the ham contributes salt of its own.
- WineA dry white — the acidity is the point. Sweeter wines leave the sauce cloying against fish.
- Yield and servingIt is poured around the fish rather than over it, with the parsley scattered last. The recipe gives no yield.
Sauce à l'Italienne belongs to the family of brown compound sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where "Italienne" signalled the presence of chopped aromatics — most often mushroom duxelles, ham and herbs — rather than any actual Italian origin. Its appearance in an American cooking-school manual shows how far such teaching reached toward professional French practice even while addressing household cooks: the method, from the aromatic base through the browned roux to the final straining, is straight out of the restaurant repertoire, scaled to a domestic saucepan. The insistence on pouring the sauce around the fish rather than over it may perhaps be read as a period marker too, suggesting a service style in which a sauce framed the dish on its platter instead of masking it.