No. 470

Genoise Sauce

Sauce a la Genoise

This sauce must not be confused with genevoise. Put into a saucepan two gills of vinegar, and two chopped shallots, let reduce till dry, then add a pint of espagnole (No. 414) and two gills of chicken essence (No. 387) or else fish essence (No. 388), according if needed for fat or lean; one ounce of chopped gherkins, two tablespoonfuls of small nonpareil capers, half an ounce of Sultana raisins and half an ounce of currants, a coffeespoonful of sugar, a dash of cayenne, mignonette, and nutmeg; reduce the whole to a proper consistency and add one gill of tomato puree; boil, despumate and reduce to the consistency of a light sauce. Serve this sauce with roasted or broiled poultry.

← No. 469 Genevoise Sauce Hot Sauces No. 471 Gooseberry Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A sweet-sour brown sauce built on espagnole, so most of the work happens before you start: without a good brown sauce base there is nothing here to reduce. Ranhofer's cross-references (Nos. 414, 387, 388) are to recipes elsewhere in The Epicurean, and the substitutions below stand in for them.

Gills and coffeespoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of vinegar is 1 cup and a pint of espagnole is 2 cups. A coffeespoonful is roughly half a teaspoon.
EspagnoleThe base is a brown sauce made from brown roux, veal or beef stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. A well-reduced homemade demi-glace or a good unsalted brown stock thickened lightly will carry the sauce; commercial gravy bases are too salty for a preparation that gets reduced twice more.
Chicken or fish essence"Essence" here means a stock reduced hard until intensely flavoured, not an extract from a bottle. The fat/lean choice is the old distinction between meat days and fast days: chicken essence for poultry and meat, fish essence when the sauce goes to fish.
MignonetteMignonette (mignonette pepper) is coarsely cracked pepper, usually white peppercorns or a mixture of white and black. Cracked white pepper is the closest thing on a modern shelf.
Nonpareil capersNonpareils are the smallest grade of caper, about 7 mm. Rinse brined capers before adding, or the finished reduction turns aggressively salty.
DespumateTo despumate is to skim: keep the sauce at a bare simmer on one side of the burner and lift off the scum and fat that gather at the edge. Skipping this leaves the sauce cloudy and greasy rather than glossy.
Reduce the vinegar properlyThe first reduction with the shallots must go to the point of dryness, or nearly so. Leave liquid vinegar behind and the sauce stays sharp instead of sweet-sour, and no amount of later reduction fixes it.
Dried fruitHalf an ounce each of sultanas and currants is about a tablespoon each. They are meant to soften and give up their sugar into the sauce, so add them with the espagnole rather than at the end.
YieldAfter both reductions you will have somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 cups of finished sauce; the recipe gives no yield, but that is roughly enough for six to eight servings of roast or broiled poultry.

A Little History

Ranhofer opens with a warning because two nearly identical names sat side by side in the nineteenth-century French repertoire: genevoise, from Geneva, is a red-wine sauce classically served with salmon or trout, while genoise claims Genoa and belongs to the family of sweet-sour brown sauces flavoured with vinegar, dried fruit, capers and gherkins. That combination is a genuinely old Italian idea — the agrodolce seasoning of raisins, currants and vinegar appears in Renaissance Italian cookery long before it was codified in French kitchens — and French chefs generally attached the label "génoise" or "à la génoise" to preparations carrying that sweet-sour signature. Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopedic system rather than a collection of dishes, which is why this entry is little more than a list of additions to a mother sauce given earlier in the same chapter: the reader was expected to have the espagnole already on the stove.