No. 636

Ziska Sauce, Parisian Sauce for All Foods

Sauce Ziska, Sauce Parisienne pour tous Mets

Put into a bowl two teaspoonfuls of English mustard with a little salt and some sugar; beat it all well together, then pour in slowly the value of three gills of sweet oil, and half a gill of good vinegar, also a few finely chopped pickled gherkins.

Parisian Sauce for all Foods.—Put into an earthen vessel, either over hot cinders or in a heater for twenty-four hours, two gills of water, two gills of vinegar, one gill of verjuice, two gills of white wine, one ounce of ground mustard seeds, half an ounce of black pepper, half a teaspoonful of ground ginger, half a teaspoonful of mace, a quarter of a teaspoonful of cloves, four ounces of salt, a few branches of basil, four bay leaves, two ounces of pounded shallots, one dried bitter orange peel, and half a gill of lemon juice. After all these have infused for two days, strain the sauce through a fine sieve, put it into bottles, and keep it to use for cold meats.

Garnishings

All the following garnishings may be served for removes by arranging them in clusters and making them either larger or smaller, according to the dishes required to be garnished. For large pieces of meat that are intended for removes they must be larger than for those intended for entrees; in the later case they should be mixed together instead of being dressed in separate groups.

← No. 635 Vinegar Sauce with Shallots and Mustard Cold Sauces No. 637 Admiral Garnishing →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two unrelated cold sauces printed under one number: a quick mustard vinaigrette and a spiced vinegar condiment for cold meat that takes two days. The measurements are in gills throughout.

GillsA gill is half a cup. Three gills of oil is 1 1/2 cups, half a gill of vinegar is 1/4 cup — a 6:1 ratio, far leaner in acid than a modern vinaigrette. Taste and add vinegar if it reads as flat oil.
English mustardTwo teaspoonfuls of dry English mustard powder (Colman's is the best-known surviving example) is most likely what is meant, not prepared mustard from a jar. The recipe gives no resting time; it goes straight from beating the mustard with salt and sugar to pouring in the oil.
It will separateThere is no egg here, so the Ziska is a suspension, not a true mayonnaise. Add the oil in a thin thread while whisking hard, and expect to re-whisk before serving; the mustard and chopped gherkin help hold it briefly.
VerjuiceOne gill (1/2 cup) of the juice of unripe grapes. It is sold again by specialist grocers; a mix of white wine vinegar and lemon juice, or unsweetened white grape juice sharpened with lemon, stands in adequately.
"Over hot cinders or in a heater"This means gentle, sustained warmth: the cool edge of a range or a very low oven. The recipe gives no temperature. It should not be allowed to simmer.
Twenty-four hours, then two daysThe two time-frames sit awkwardly together: twenty-four hours in the heater, then straining after the ingredients have infused for two days. It reads most easily as a day of warm infusion followed by further steeping before straining; the total time is elastic.
Bitter orange peelDried Seville orange peel, not sweet orange. Dried bitter orange peel from a spice merchant is the closest match; sweet peel gives none of the resinous edge.
Four ounces of saltThat is a large amount against about seven gills of liquid, which is the point: this is a bottled seasoning to be spooned over cold meat, not a dressing to be poured. Treat it like a table sauce.
Yield and keepingThe Parisian sauce makes roughly 3 1/2 cups. It is preserved by acid and salt rather than heat, so bottle it in clean jars and refrigerate; the Ziska makes about 1 3/4 cups and should be used the day it is made.

A Little History

Both sauces come from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York, where cold sauces are catalogued by the dozen. Ranhofer records no explanation of the name Ziska, and none is documented. The second sauce belongs to an older tradition: a warm-infused, heavily salted spiced vinegar, bottled and kept on hand, of a type related to the nineteenth-century "store sauces" and commercial bottled sauces such as Worcestershire. Its ingredient list — verjuice, bitter orange, mace, cloves, basil, bay — reads closer to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookery than to much of the rest of Ranhofer's book, and its survival here suggests how long such keeping sauces stayed useful in a kitchen that had to dress cold meat at short notice.