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Sauce for Suckling Pig
Put two tablespoonfuls of chopped onion, and one tablespoonful of salad oil into a saucepan over the fire, and cook gently until the onions are done, but without allowing them to take color; then add half a dozen tablespoonfuls of milk, one wineglassful of Madeira or sherry wine, and two breakfast cupfuls of white sauce, and boil for fifteen minutes, skimming frequently. Add a tablespoonful of minced mushrooms, half that quantity of parsley, also minced, one tablespoonful each of salt and sugar, and a small quantity of white pepper. Boil up once, and the sauce is ready for use.
A wine-and-mushroom velouté in the French service style, meant to be ladled over roast suckling pig at the table. The recipe assumes you already have a pot of white sauce standing by, which was true in a hotel kitchen and is not true in most homes.
- White sauceTwo breakfast cupfuls means about a pint of béchamel: 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 2 cups whole milk, cooked until it no longer tastes of raw flour. The recipe gives no formula for it and assumes it is already made, so make it first and keep it warm.
- Breakfast cup and wineglassA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz; take it as a standard cup. A wineglassful in period American cookbooks is about 2 fl oz, not a modern pour.
- The salt is out of scaleA tablespoon of salt in a pint and a half of sauce is punishing by current palates, and the tablespoon of sugar with it reads as hotel-era sweetness. Season with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, then taste and adjust at the end.
- Skim, and mean itThe fifteen minutes of boiling with frequent skimming is the step that makes this sauce rather than thinned béchamel. It cooks off the raw alcohol, reduces and concentrates, and lifts scum and loose starch off the surface. Keep it at a bare boil and pull the skin as it forms.
- Onions without colorSweat the onion in the oil over low heat, covered if it helps, until translucent. Any browning shows in the finished sauce, which is meant to be pale.
- MushroomsMinced mushrooms added at the end release water and taste raw after a single boil. Sweat them separately in a little butter until their liquid has gone, then stir them in.
- StrainingOscar leaves the onion in. For a smoother sauce, strain after the fifteen-minute boil and add the mushrooms and parsley to the strained liquid.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough for eight to ten servings of roast pork. It reheats gently but will need thinning with milk.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel from 1893, and this book records the kitchen's working repertoire rather than home cookery, which is why it opens on an assumption of white sauce already made: a station cook would have had it on hand. Suckling pig was a set-piece of the American hotel banquet and of German and Central European holiday tables, and the sauce here is the classic accompaniment logic reversed. Where English practice paired roast pork with sharp applesauce, the continental hotel kitchen answered rich pork with a fortified wine velouté, the Madeira or sherry doing the work of cutting the fat. Madeira in particular held its place on American tables long after the trade that made it fashionable in the eighteenth century had faded, largely because fortification and heating were said to leave it better able to survive heat and travel than table wine.