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Recipes: Ingredients
No. 4. Mirepoix Sauce (for masking) Ingredients: Bacon, onions, carrots, ham, a bunch of herbs, parsley, mushrooms, cloves, peppercorns, stock, Chablis.
Put the following ingredients into a stewpan: Some bits of bacon and lean ham, a carrot, all cut into dice, half an onion, a bunch of herbs, a few mushroom cuttings, two cloves, and four peppercorns. To this add one and a quarter pint of good stock and a glass of Chablis, boil rapidly for ten minutes, then simmer till it is reduced to a third. Pass through a sieve and use for masking meat, fowl, fish, &c.
No. 5. Genoese Sauce Ingredients: Onion, butter, Burgundy, mushrooms, truffles, parsley, bay leaf, Espagnole sauce (No. 1), blond of veal, essence of fish, anchovy butter, crayfish or lobster butter.
Cut up a small onion and fry it in butter, add a glass of Burgundy, some cuttings of mushrooms and truffles, a pinch of chopped parsley and half a bay leaf. Reduce half.
In another saucepan put two cups of Espagnole sauce, one cup of veal stock, and a tablespoonful of essence of fish, reduce one-third and add it to the other saucepan, skim off all the grease, boil for a few minutes, and pass through a sieve. Then stir it over the fire, and add half a teaspoon ful of crayfish and half of anchovy butter.
No. 6. Italian Sauce Ingredients: Chablis, mushrooms, leeks, a bunch of herbs, peppercorns, Espagnole sauce, game gravy or stock, lemon.
Put into a stewpan two glasses of Chablis, two tablespoonsful of mushroom trimmings, a leek cut up, a bunch of herbs, five peppercorns, and boil till it is reduced to half. In another stewpan mix two glasses of Espagnole (No. I) or Veluté sauce (No. 2) and half a glass of game gravy, boil for a few minutes, then blend the contents of the two stewpans, pass through a sieve, and add the juice of a lemon.
Three classical compound sauces that assume you already have a stockpot going and a mother sauce in the larder. Read them as reduction formulas rather than shopping lists: the quantities are proportions, and the hinge in all three is how far you take the reduction before straining.
- "Masking" means coating, not bakingA masking sauce is one reduced far enough to cling to cold or warm meat, fowl or fish in a glossy layer. The mirepoix sauce is finished when a spoon drawn through it leaves a trail; if it slides off the food, reduce further.
- A glass of wineIn English cookery books of this period a wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure is genuinely loose and the book never defines it. Treat it as a starting point of roughly a quarter cup and adjust by taste after reduction.
- Imperial pintsOne and a quarter pint of stock in a British book of 1901 is 25 imperial fl oz, about 3 US cups, not the 20 fl oz that 1 1/4 US pints would give.
- Espagnole and veloutéNo. 1 and No. 2 are the brown and pale flour-thickened veal stocks that underpin the whole chapter. Neither is a supermarket item; a well-reduced brown veal stock, lightly thickened, stands in for Espagnole, and a light stock thickened with a blond roux for velouté.
- Blond of veal, essence of fishBlond of veal is pale veal stock, unroasted bones. Essence of fish is a fish fumet boiled down to a syrupy concentrate: a tablespoon carries a great deal of flavour, so reduce your own rather than substituting bottled fish sauce, which is a different thing entirely.
- Crayfish, lobster and anchovy buttersCompound butters, pounded shells or anchovy worked into softened butter and sieved. The recipe adds them while stirring over the fire; keep the heat gentle rather than boiling, which dulls the shellfish aroma. Half a teaspoon each is a finishing accent, not a base.
- Mushroom and truffle "cuttings"These are the peelings and stalks a professional kitchen had on hand. Stalks, and the trimmings from cleaning caps, do the same work; there is no need to buy truffle for the Genoese, though a spoon of the soaking liquid from dried mushrooms adds body.
- Straining and skimmingPass each sauce through a fine sieve or chinois, pressing the solids, then skim carefully. The fat from bacon, ham and butter is what separates a clear sauce from a greasy one, and these reductions concentrate it.
- YieldYields differ: the mirepoix reduces to a third of its 1 1/4 pints of stock plus wine, so roughly a cup, while the Genoese, built on two cups of Espagnole and a cup of veal stock reduced by only a third, finishes considerably larger. All three keep a few days refrigerated.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was written by Mrs W. G. Waters, framed as a narrative of Italian cookery lessons, but its opening list of foundation sauces is pure Carême-descended French professional practice, the vocabulary that ruled hotel and club kitchens across Europe at the time. Mirepoix is generally traced to the household of the Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix in the eighteenth century, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. "Genoese" and "Italian" sauces, despite the names, were categories in the French repertoire rather than dishes any Genoese or Roman cook would have recognised: the labels signalled a particular combination of red wine, fish essence and shellfish butter, or of white wine, mushrooms and lemon. That a book selling itself on Italian cookery opens with them says a good deal about how thoroughly French terminology had colonised the English kitchen bookshelf by 1900.