No. 519

Piedmontese Sauce

Sauce Piemontaise

Fry lightly without coloring in two ounces of clarified butter, four ounces of onions, when done, drain the butter, and finish cooking them in one pint of veal blond (No. 423). Skim off all the fat, and then pour in a pint of bechamel (No. 409) or espagnole (No. 414), reduce and add two ounces of white Piemont truffles cut in squares; just when ready to serve, stir in an ounce of garlic butter (No. 576) mixed with anchovy butter (No. 569); then add a dash of cayenne pepper and the juice of a lemon.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compound sauce from Ranhofer's cross-referenced system: it assumes you already have veal blond, béchamel or espagnole, and two flavored butters on hand. Here is what those numbers stand for and where the sauce can go wrong.

The cross-referencesVeal blond (No. 423) is a pale veal stock reduced to a light amber; béchamel (No. 409) is milk thickened with white roux; espagnole (No. 414) is the brown mother sauce built on browned veal stock and roux. Any good modern equivalent works, but the two finished sauces give very different results — béchamel makes it ivory and mild, espagnole dark and savory.
Garlic and anchovy buttersNos. 576 and 569 are Ranhofer's compound butters; they are not reproduced on this page, but such butters are conventionally butter pounded with garlic or with anchovy and passed through a sieve. Both are easy to improvise: soften butter, mash in blanched garlic or rinsed anchovy, push through a fine strainer. One ounce of the mixture is about two tablespoons — assertive but not dominant in a sauce this size.
Do not boil after the finishing buttersThe recipe adds them "just when ready to serve," which implies the sauce is off the boil so the butters melt in smoothly rather than breaking. Continued boiling afterwards will coarsen the garlic and can cause the butter to separate out.
Onions, softened not browned"Fry lightly without coloring" means sweating: low heat, covered if needed, until translucent. Four ounces is roughly one small to medium onion, finely chopped. Any color here fights the delicacy of the truffle.
White Piedmont trufflesTuber magnatum, in season roughly October to December and priced accordingly. Ranhofer cuts them in squares and cooks them in the sauce, which is not how white truffle is treated today — the aroma is volatile and largely lost to heat. Shaving them raw over the finished sauce respects the ingredient and the budget; a small amount of good truffle paste stirred in at the end is the practical substitute.
Reduction and yieldA pint of veal blond plus a pint of bechamel or espagnole begins at a quart, and Ranhofer reduces twice, so the finished sauce is appreciably less than that. Reduce until it coats a spoon; the sauce should slide, not pour.
Clarified butterTwo ounces is four tablespoons. It is specified because whole butter would brown the milk solids and color the onions; a neutral oil does the same job if clarified butter is not to hand.
Seasoning at the endAnchovy butter carries considerable salt, so hold back on salting until after it goes in. The lemon juice and cayenne go in last, as the recipe directs; lemon in particular loses its lift with cooking.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house repertory written out in the classical French manner, with every sauce numbered and cross-referenced so a cook could build one from another. "Piemontaise" in nineteenth-century French kitchen language generally signals white truffle or rice from the Piedmont region — here the truffle. White truffles were an established luxury in the European trade by the time Ranhofer wrote, and their appearance on a New York menu was a statement of what Delmonico's could source. The recipe's structure, in which a garnished sauce is built by adding aromatics to a mother sauce and finished with a compound butter, is the method Escoffier would codify in Le Guide Culinaire in 1903.