No. 469

Genevoise Sauce

Sauce Genevoise

Place in a saucepan one pound of the head of salmon, moisten it with a bottleful of red wine, and a pint of fish broth or water; add four ounces of mushroom parings, a bunch of parsley garnished with bay leaf, as much thyme, and a clove of garlic, two shallots, and one minced onion, a teaspoonful of pepper corns, and half a teaspoonful of whole allspice; set it on the fire to boil and continue boiling slowly for half an hour. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve; reduce it with a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414) and half a gill of Madeira wine; when the sauce is well reduced and despumated, work into it just when ready to serve, two ounces of anchovy butter (No. 569).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic red-wine fish sauce built on salmon trimmings and espagnole. The work is mostly in the reduction; the finish is where it can be lost.

The hinge: finish off the heatThe hinge: the finish -- The anchovy butter goes in "just when ready to serve." Ranhofer gives no further instruction, but the usual practice with a butter finish is to pull the pan from the heat and swirl the butter in in pieces rather than let it boil; overheated, the butter can separate and the sauce go oily.
MeasurementsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of Madeira is 4 tablespoons. "A bottleful" of red wine is 750 ml in modern terms; Ranhofer's pint is 16 fl oz.
Salmon headAsk a fishmonger for a head, collar or frame; a pound of trimmings from a whole side works as well. Rinse away blood, which makes the reduction bitter and cloudy.
Mushroom paringsFour ounces of peelings and stalks, a by-product of large-kitchen prep. Sliced button or cremini mushrooms, stems included, are a workable substitute.
EspagnoleA brown veal stock sauce thickened with brown roux and simmered for hours (No. 414). A good store-bought or homemade demi-glace stands in; if using a reduced stock without thickening, expect a thinner sauce.
DespumatedSkimmed. As the sauce reduces, fat and albumen rise as a grey foam; lift it off repeatedly with a ladle rather than stirring it back in.
Fish brothA light fumet of white fish bones, not a heavy stock. Water is offered as the alternative and is not a poor one here, since the salmon head supplies plenty of body.
YieldExpect roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups after reduction, enough for six to eight portions of poached or braised fish. The recipe names no dish; by convention the sauce is served with salmon and trout.

A Little History

Sauce genevoise belongs to the small family of nineteenth-century red-wine sauces made for freshwater and migratory fish rather than meat, and the name is often said to point to Geneva, though the two names have long been confused, and cooks have never settled whether it was a corruption of génoise, Genoa's sauce, which Ranhofer prints immediately afterward as a separate recipe. Its logic is thoroughly of its era: the trimmings of the fish being served flavor the sauce that will dress it, the whole thing propped up by espagnole, the brown mother sauce of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of his decades at Delmonico's in New York. The finishing anchovy butter is the old trick of reinforcing fish with fish, a habit inherited from an English and French taste for anchovy as a savory seasoning long before glutamate had a name.