No. 489

Lombarde Sauce

Sauce Lombarde

Have in a saucepan half a bottleful of white wine, add to it two ounces of butter, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, two finely chopped and blanched shallots and a quarter of a pound of chopped mushrooms. Let all simmer till the liquid is reduced, then add a pint of bechamel (No. 409), and a gill of cream, also the juice of a lemon and a pinch of mignonette.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A white-wine and mushroom sauce built on béchamel, close kin to a sauce Bercy or a bonnefoy in method. The instructions are terse in the way Ranhofer's are throughout, so the two things to get right are the depth of the reduction and the handling of the lemon at the end.

The hinge: reduce properly"Simmer till the liquid is reduced" most likely means until the wine is well down and the mushrooms and shallots are moist rather than swimming. Stop short of that and the finished sauce risks being thin and sharply acidic, since the béchamel has to carry the extra liquid.
Half a bottleful1890s wine bottles were not standardised but generally ran in the region of today's 750 ml, so read this as roughly 1½ cups. Use a dry, unoaked white; anything sweet will show once the wine is reduced.
A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. Heavy cream is the right choice — the sauce is reduced and then finished, and lighter cream is prone to breaking.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked peppercorns, traditionally white or a white-and-black mix, not the shallot-vinegar relish that goes with oysters today. A pinch means a pinch; it is meant to be felt on the palate, not seen.
Béchamel No. 409Ranhofer's béchamel is richer than a plain milk béchamel, so check No. 409 for what he actually specifies. A pint of a good medium-thick béchamel works; if yours is on the loose side, reduce the sauce a little after adding it.
Blanching the shallotsA brief drop into boiling water before chopping takes the raw bite out and keeps the sauce clean-tasting.
The lemon goes in last, off the heatThe lemon at the end -- The recipe does not say, but it is safer to slacken the heat before stirring in the juice, since a whole lemon's worth of acid into a hot cream sauce can split it. Taste before adding all of it -- half a lemon is often enough.
MushroomsChop them fine, closer to a duxelles than to slices; the sauce is meant to be smooth-bodied with texture suspended in it. Plain white or cremini are appropriate.
Yield and useRoughly three cups. It suits poached or braised white meats and fish -- chicken, veal, sweetbreads, sole.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) catalogues the repertoire he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and its hot-sauce chapter is essentially the French classical system transplanted whole: a handful of mother sauces, each numbered, and dozens of small sauces derived from them by cross-reference. Sauce Lombarde is one of those derivatives — béchamel plus a white-wine reduction with shallot, parsley and mushroom, sharpened with lemon and cracked pepper. Names like this one, evoking Lombardy, are often said to have been attached loosely in nineteenth-century French kitchens, and it is generally assumed that they seldom point to any real regional origin, serving instead as a kind of menu shorthand that told a trained cook what was in the pan. The construction here — reduce aromatics in wine, mount with a finished mother sauce, enrich with cream, correct with acid at the last moment — is the standard grammar of the period and remains the way small sauces are built.