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Geneva Sauce
Put one tablespoonful of butter into a saucepan, add one dessertspoonful of flour, and stir it over the fire until brown. Mix with butter and flour one pint of fish broth and one-half pint of red wine; add two sliced onions, a bunch of sweet herbs, two tablespoonfuls of chopped mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste. Allow the sauce to boil slowly for half an hour, then mix with it one wineglassful of Madeira, strain the sauce through a fine hair-sieve, and serve it. One teaspoonful of brandy may be added to the sauce in place of the Madeira if preferred.
A brown-roux fish sauce of the classic French repertoire, built on fish stock and red wine and meant for salmon or trout. Most of what needs translating here is measurement and equipment.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, i.e. between a teaspoon and a tablespoon.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup). That is the amount of Madeira to add at the end.
- Fish brothA fumet: fish bones and trimmings simmered 20-30 minutes with onion, parsley stems and a little white wine, then strained. Bottled clam juice diluted with water is a workable stand-in; do not use a heavily salted stock base, as the sauce reduces for half an hour.
- Brown the roux properlyThis is the hinge. Take the butter and flour to the colour of a hazelnut over moderate heat, stirring constantly, before any liquid goes in. A pale roux gives a thin, sour-tasting red-wine sauce; a properly browned one carries the wine.
- Hair-sieveA fine horsehair sieve; hair was generally preferred for acidic mixtures, metal mesh being thought liable to taint them. Any fine-mesh strainer or a chinois does the job; discard the solids.
- Sweet herbsA small bundle of herbs, typically including thyme, parsley stems and bay; period 'sweet herbs' could also take in marjoram, savory or basil. Tie it if you like, though everything is strained in the end anyway.
- The brandy substitutionA teaspoon of brandy is nowhere near two ounces of Madeira in either volume or sweetness. Treat it as a different sauce rather than an equivalent, and taste for salt afterwards, since you have lost the wine's roundness.
- Yield and servingExpect rather less than the roughly 26 fluid ounces of liquid that go in, depending on how hard it boils; the recipe gives no yield or number of servings. Serve it hot under or beside poached or braised salmon or trout; a final knob of cold butter whisked in off the heat is a traditional finish.
This is sauce génevoise, one of the standard brown fish sauces of nineteenth-century French cooking and a fixture in the professional repertoire of the era's grand hotel dining rooms. The name points to Geneva, though the spelling appears variously as génevoise or génoise (Genoese); the association with Lake Geneva trout is the usual explanation offered. What makes the sauce distinctive is that it is a red-wine sauce for fish, built on fish stock rather than meat glaze at a time when brown sauces were almost always beef-based, and Madeira is added at the end. Its appearance in a hotel cookbook of the period is a reminder of how completely American luxury dining then ran on French kitchen French, sauce names and all.