No. 514

Sauce a la Palermitaine

Place all together in a saucepan one ounce of cooked, minced ham, one ounce of chopped pignolas, one clove of garlic, one gill of oil, eight tomatoes washed, cut across in two and well pressed, a bunch of parsley garnished with as much bay leaf as thyme, mignonette, nutmeg and two cloves. Let all cook, then drain, and strain forcibly through a fine sieve, reduce together both the broth and puree, adding to it two gills of white wine, a teaspoonful of sugar, three gills of broth, one quart of allemande (No. 407), four ounces of butter, and the pulp of a lemon.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's kitchen sauce written for a brigade, not a home cook: it assumes you already have a quart of sauce allemande standing by. Read it as two operations — a tomato-and-aromatic base cooked down in oil, then that base mounted into a finished velouté.

The hinge: allemandeSauce allemande (Ranhofer's No. 407) is velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison. Once it goes in, the sauce must not boil or the yolks will curdle and break the emulsion. Do all reducing before the allemande joins the pan.
Gills and quartsA gill is half a cup, so one gill of oil is 1/2 cup, two gills of white wine is 1 cup, three gills of broth is 1 1/2 cups. The quart of allemande is a US quart, 4 cups.
MignonetteIn this period mignonette means coarsely cracked white or black peppercorns, not the shallot-vinegar relish served with oysters today. A generous pinch, cracked in a mortar, tied into the herb bundle.
PignolasPine nuts. Chopped, they melt into the sieved puree and give body; toasting them first is not called for and would push the sauce toward a pesto flavour it is not meant to have.
The tomatoes"Well pressed" means squeezed to expel seeds and watery jelly, which would otherwise dilute the reduction. Eight ripe summer tomatoes is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb; out of season, good canned whole tomatoes drained hard are closer to the intent than pale fresh ones.
"Strain forcibly"Push the cooked base through a fine sieve with a ladle or the back of a spoon so the pulp goes through and only skins, seeds and the herb bundle stay behind. A food mill does the same work faster; a final pass through a chinois gives a smoother finish.
Pulp of a lemonThe flesh, membrane and seeds removed, chopped -- not just the juice. The recipe lists it among the final additions, for acidity and freshness against the butter.
Butter and heatFour ounces is one stick, whisked in cold, in pieces, over low heat at the very finish. Combined with the yolk-bound allemande this sauce cannot be reheated hard; hold it warm in a bain-marie.
YieldSomething over 1 1/2 quarts of finished sauce — a service quantity. Halving or quartering the recipe works cleanly provided the tomato base is still reduced properly.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a chapter of well over a hundred hot sauces, all built on a handful of mother sauces so a brigade could turn out dozens of variations from stock preparations. The name points to Palermo, and the Sicilian markers are on the page: olive oil rather than butter as the cooking fat, garlic, tomato, and pine nuts. But the construction is entirely French — the mixture sieved, reduced with wine and broth, then folded into sauce allemande and mounted with butter, so what reaches the plate is a velouté. That is often said to have been the usual nineteenth-century approach to regional names in a grand-restaurant repertoire: a dish was called a la Palermitaine or a la Portugaise for its flavourings, not its method, and the underlying technique stayed French throughout.