No. 465

Finnoise Sauce

Sauce a la Finnoise

Put two gills of veloute (No. 415) into a saucepan with six tablespoonfuls of melted meatglaze (No. 401), a pinch of paprika and a pinch of sweet Spanish pepper and salt; mix all well together, let boil, and incorporate slowly into it six ounces of butter, working it in with a wire whisk, and then add a coffeespoonful of chopped up parsley just when prepared to serve.

← No. 464 Financiere Sauce for Fat and for Lean and wi Hot Sauces No. 466 Flavignan Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A butter-mounted velouté in the classic French manner, cross-referenced to two other Ranhofer preparations you must have on hand before you start. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions are richer than most modern sauces and the order of operations is unforgiving.

Do not boil after the butter goes inThe sauce is brought to a boil before the butter is added; Ranhofer says only to incorporate it "slowly" with a whisk, but a second boil after the butter risks breaking the emulsion into a greasy layer over thin velouté, so keep it off direct heat as you whisk.
Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of velouté (No. 415) — a light stock-based white sauce thickened with white roux, typically veal or chicken stock.
Melted meat glazeNo. 401 is glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Six tablespoons is a great deal of concentrated reduction; commercial demi-glace or a good reduced stock is the nearest equivalent, and taste before adding salt because glaze carries its own.
Sweet Spanish pepperMost likely sweet pimentón, the mild Spanish paprika, listed separately from the plain "paprika" of the first pinch; the recipe does not say what kind that first paprika was. Two distinct peppers, one for warmth and one for colour and sweetness.
CoffeespoonfulSmaller than a teaspoon in period usage, roughly half a teaspoon. For chopped parsley, err generous; it is added at the last moment so the colour stays bright.
Butter quantitySix ounces of butter is about twelve tablespoons, roughly three-quarters of a cup to the cup of velouté — a very high proportion. Working it in slowly in small pieces, off direct heat as for a beurre blanc, will thicken and gloss the sauce; Ranhofer says only to incorporate it slowly with a wire whisk.
Holding and yieldCloser to two cups once the butter and glaze are in, enough for six to eight portions. It cannot be reheated over direct heat; hold it in a warm bain-marie, warm enough to stay fluid but not hot enough to split, and use it within the hour.
What to serve it withRanhofer gives no pairing here. A glazed, paprika-tinted butter sauce of this weight belongs with poached or braised fish, veal, or boiled poultry.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) recorded the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York as a working system: hundreds of numbered preparations, each built from others by cross-reference, so that a cook could be sent to No. 415 and No. 401 without further explanation. "Finnoise" simply means Finnish, and like most such names in the nineteenth-century French repertoire it signals a flavouring rather than an origin — here the paprika. Whether any Finnish kitchen ever made this sauce is doubtful; the naming convention was a way of indexing variations on a mother sauce, and Ranhofer's hot sauce chapter runs alphabetically through dozens of them. The technique itself, finishing a velouté with a large quantity of raw butter whisked in off the heat, is the older French practice that later codification pushed toward the more stable emulsions taught today.