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Financiere Sauce
Put one pint of stock into a saucepan with one ounce of brown roux and stir it over the fire until boiling, skimming it occasionally. Mix with the above ingredients one wineglassful each of mushroom catsup and Madeira, a little cayenne pepper and a small piece of meat-glaze. Move the saucepan to the side of the fire and let the sauce simmer gently for fifteen minutes. Skim the sauce, boil it up again and then strain it. The sauce is then ready for use. Financiere Sauce (for Fish).
Put one pint of lean Spanish sauce into a saucepan with one-half pint each of essence of mushrooms and truffles, two wineglassfuls of Madeira and a small piece of meat-glaze. Boil the mixture and reduce it until it will coat a spoon. Strain it through a silk sieve; it is then ready for use.
Two versions of one sauce: a brown stock sauce thickened with roux, and a richer fish version built on espagnole and reduced until it naps. Neither is difficult, but nearly every ingredient name has shifted since 1896.
- WineglassfulIn American kitchen books of this era a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. So the first sauce takes 1/4 cup each of mushroom catsup and Madeira, and the fish version 1/2 cup of Madeira.
- Brown roux, one ounceEqual parts butter and flour by weight, cooked to a nut-brown color: about a tablespoon of butter and two of flour by volume. One ounce to a pint of stock gives a light, pourable sauce rather than a coating one.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A commercial demi-glace or a reduced-stock concentrate stands in. "A small piece" is not quantified; a teaspoon or so is a reasonable reading, added for depth and gloss, not for volume.
- Mushroom catsupOne of the earliest English forms of ketchup: a thin, dark, salty liquor of salted mushrooms, usually spiced with mace and pepper. It still exists in British specialty ranges; a mixture of mushroom soaking liquid with a little soy and Worcestershire approximates the salt-and-umami effect, though not the perfume.
- Lean Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of brown roux and stock. What "lean" specifies here is not stated: it may mean an espagnole without fat enrichment or added ham, or, given that this version is for fish, one made without meat.
- Essence of mushrooms and trufflesConcentrated cooking liquors, not oils. Half a pint of each is a hotel-kitchen quantity; at home, reduce the soaking or poaching liquid from mushrooms and canned truffle peelings and scale the whole recipe down accordingly. Truffle oil is not a substitute and will taste synthetic in a reduced sauce.
- "Side of the fire"On a coal range the edge of the plate was the low-heat zone. It means a bare simmer with barely a bubble, so the roux clarifies and the skim can be lifted off cleanly.
- Reduce until it coats a spoonThe hinge of the fish version. Pull it when a film clings to the back of a spoon and a finger drawn through leaves a clear track; past that point the glaze goes sticky.
- Silk sieveStraining cloth, effectively a fine chinois lined with muslin. Any fine mesh with a damp cheesecloth lining does the same job.
- YieldRoughly a pint of the first sauce after skimming and straining.
Financière sauce takes its name from the elaborate garniture à la financière, a nineteenth-century French assembly of truffles, cockscombs, olives and mushrooms said to be named for the wealth of the financiers who could afford it. In the classical brigade it sits in the family of Madeira-and-truffle derivatives of espagnole, and it is generally said to have been codified by Escoffier a few years after Oscar Tschirky's book appeared. Its presence in a Waldorf compilation reflects how an American luxury hotel is generally thought to have worked in the 1890s: a large kitchen would likely have kept espagnole, glace de viande and truffle and mushroom essences going as standing stocks, so a sauce like this would have been a matter of combining and reducing rather than starting from scratch. The mushroom catsup in the first version is the older, English-influenced note in the recipe, a store-cupboard flavoring long familiar to American cooks and one that classical French practice would soon push aside.