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Italien Sauce
Put a large lump of butter into a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley, one tablespoonful each of chopped mushrooms and shallots, and one pint of white wine. Boil until reduced to half its original quantity. Mix with the above ingredients one breakfast cupful of veloute sauce and one-half breakfast cupful of stock; boil quickly over the fire until thick. Skim the sauce and keep it warm in a bain-marie until ready to serve.
A classic reduction sauce from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen, built on the two things a 1896 professional larder always had on hand: velouté and stock. The measurements assume a cook who knows what those are.
- Velouté is the whole recipeSauce italienne is nothing without it: a blond roux slackened with white veal, chicken or fish stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. Substituting a cornstarch-thickened stock gives you the volume but none of the body or gloss.
- "A large lump of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons. Here it goes into the pan with the wine and the aromatics all at once rather than being used to sweat them first, so the exact amount is forgiving.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, larger than a teacup. Treat it as one standard cup of velouté and half a cup of stock.
- Chop finer than you thinkThe mushrooms and shallots stay in the sauce, so a true fine mince (a duxelles-fine dice for the mushrooms) is what separates this from a chunky ragout. Escoffier's version uses a proper duxelles cooked down first.
- Reduce the wine hardBoiling a pint of white wine down by half drives off the raw alcohol and the sharpness. Rushing this is the usual reason a finished italienne tastes thin and acidic.
- "Boil quickly until thick"Once the velouté goes in, keep it at a strong simmer rather than a rolling boil and stir; a flour-thickened sauce scorches on the bottom of a thin pan in a minute or two.
- SkimmingSet the pan half off the heat so the convection pushes butterfat and scum to the cool side, then lift it off with a spoon. This is what gives the sauce its clean sheen.
- Parsley timingThe parsley goes in at the start here and will lose its colour over the reduction. Some cooks prefer to hold back half and stir it in at the end for freshness.
- Yield and useRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, depending on how far the final boil is taken; enough for four to six servings. It is a coating sauce for grilled or sauteed veal, chicken, eggs or fish rather than something ladled into a bowl.
Sauce italienne belongs to the codified French repertoire rather than to Italy; the name is generally traced to the duxelles of mushrooms and shallots that flavours it, one of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French kitchen labels attached to a preparation more for its style than its origin. By the time Oscar Tschirky assembled his 1896 cookbook, a page like this one was really a working note: a cook who could not already make velout he The The bain-marie at the end is the tell. In a hotel kitchen serving hundreds, finished sauces sat in covered pots in a water bath for the length of service, held hot without ever returning to a boil that would break or scorch them.