No. 520

Pignola Sauce, Italian Style

Sauce aux Pignons a l'Ttalienne

Put two ounces of brown sugar in a saucepan with three gills of good vinegar, three gills of veal blond (No. 423), and a bunch of parsley garnished with a bay leaf and thyme, some mignonette and nutmeg. Let the whole simmer over a slow fire, and reduce it to half. Then add a pint of espagnole (No. 414) and two gills of red wine; reduce again and put in four ounces of pignolas, let them boil in the sauce and serve.

← No. 519 Piedmontese Sauce Hot Sauces No. 521 Pimentade Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A sweet-sour brown sauce built on two of Ranhofer's foundation preparations, thickened by reduction rather than by any last-minute liaison. Everything hinges on the reductions being taken far enough that the vinegar loses its rawness.

Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups and two gills is 1 cup. The pint of espagnole is a US pint, 2 cups. The first stage therefore starts at about 3 cups and goes to half; the espagnole and wine add 3 cups more, and the final volume depends on how far you take the second reduction.
Veal blondRanhofer's No. 423 is a pale veal stock, kept light in colour rather than browned. Any good unsalted veal or light brown chicken stock stands in; avoid anything already reduced to a syrupy glace, since this sauce reduces twice.
EspagnoleHis No. 414 is the classic brown roux-based mother sauce, itself simmered for hours and skimmed. A modern demi-glace, or a well-reduced brown veal stock with enough body to coat, is the practical substitute.
MignonetteNot the sauce for oysters and not the flower. In nineteenth-century kitchen French, mignonette is coarsely cracked pepper, usually white. A large pinch is right for this quantity.
PignolasPine nuts. Four ounces is a generous 3/4 cup. They are high in oil and go rancid quickly, so taste one before committing; buy them fresh and keep them frozen. Toasting them lightly before they go in deepens the flavour, though Ranhofer simply boils them in the sauce.
The two reductionsThe first, sugar and vinegar with stock and herbs down to half, is what tames the acidity. If you shorten it the finished sauce will taste sharp rather than sweet-sour. The second reduction, after the espagnole and red wine, is for consistency alone.
StrainingRanhofer does not say to strain, but the parsley bunch, bay and thyme are best lifted out before the pine nuts go in; a pass through a fine chinois at that point would also catch the cracked pepper. Add the pignolas to the sauce and give them a few minutes' simmer to soften.
Yield and serviceA modest quantity of sauce, its final volume depending on the second reduction. Ranhofer files it only among the hot sauces and names no meat, though the sugar-and-vinegar balance suits rich roast meats.

A Little History

Sweet-sour sauces darkened with pine nuts belong to a long Italian line that runs back through Renaissance cookery to the medieval taste for combining vinegar, sugar and dried fruit or nuts with roast meat, and they survived longest in the Italian repertoire for game, in dishes such as cinghiale in agrodolce. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), catalogued the sauce among his hot sauces in the French idiom he worked in, giving it a French title and rebuilding it on espagnole and veal blond. That is the book's method throughout: regional dishes are absorbed into a system of numbered mother sauces and stocks, each recipe cross-referenced to the preparations that precede it, so that a brigade could execute any of them without repeating the base work.