No. 499

Sauce a la Milanese

Sauce a la Milanaise

Have two ounces of butter in a saucepan with one ounce of minced, raw ham and two table spoonfuls of chopped shallot; fry them without coloring, and then add a small handful of parsley and basil, a bay leaf and as much thyme, one ounce of chopped mushrooms, a pinch of cayenne, a bit of mace, two cloves, one coffeespoonful of sugar, the juice of a lemon, half a gill of dry Madeira, and a pint of consomme (No. 189). Boil all and reduce it to half, then add one pint of allemande sauce (No. 407), and strain the whole through a tammy (No. 159), afterward incorporating into it two ounces of fine butter. A garnishing should be added to this sauce of pignolas, cooked spaghetti cut in half inch lengths, cooked ham and mushrooms cut in half inch sticks and an eighth of an inch square.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compound sauce in the full nineteenth-century style: an aromatic reduction finished with allemande and butter, then garnished. It depends on two other numbered recipes, so read it as the last step of a chain rather than a standalone.

The hinge: allemande must not boilAllemande (No. 407) is velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison. Once it goes in, keep the sauce below a simmer or the yolks will scramble and the sauce will break. The same applies to the final two ounces of butter, which should be whisked in off the heat.
Half a gill of MadeiraA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, about 60 ml. Use a genuinely dry Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho); modern sweet cooking Madeira will fight the spoonful of sugar already in the pan.
CoffeespoonfulThe book does not define the measure; a coffeespoon is usually taken as the small spoon of a demitasse service, perhaps half a teaspoon. Treat the sugar as a seasoning to balance the lemon juice, not as sweetening.
Raw ham"Minced, raw ham" means uncooked dry-cured ham, prosciutto crudo or an unsmoked country ham, not fresh pork. It is fried gently in butter to render fat and flavour without browning; a smoked ham will dominate.
TammyA tammy was a worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois, or a conical sieve lined with damp muslin, does the same job. Press rather than wring, and strain before the final butter goes in.
PignolasPine nuts. They are best lightly toasted and added at the last moment so they stay crisp against the spaghetti and the julienned ham and mushroom.
The garnish is the pointHalf-inch lengths of cooked spaghetti with ham and mushroom cut in short matchsticks are what make the sauce "milanaise"; without them it is simply a Madeira-scented allemande. Cook the pasta fully, drain well, and fold it in warm.
YieldA pint of consomme reduced to a cup plus a pint of allemande gives roughly three cups of finished sauce before garnish, for serving over veal cutlets, sweetbreads or poached chicken.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium written during his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows how that kitchen worked: nothing stands alone, and a single sauce sends the cook back to numbered entries for consomme, allemande and even the method of straining. In French kitchen shorthand a la milanaise signals an Italian-leaning garnish built on pasta with ham, tongue or mushroom cut in short julienne, a convention generally traced to the grand nineteenth-century repertoire rather than to any actual Milanese household dish; the pine nuts and the mace here belong to the same borrowed-Italian imagination. What the sauce really documents is the labour available to a great restaurant of the 1890s, where reducing a pint of consomme and wringing the result through a worsted tammy was an unremarkable afternoon's work.