Home › The World's Kitchen › Sauce a L'Ancienne
Sauce a L'Ancienne
Melt one tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add one tablespoon sifted flour; stir well while lightly browning for two minutes. Pour in one gill hot milk and half gill fish stock. Season with one-quarter teaspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper. Stir well with a wooden spoon for two minutes. Add two finely minced gherkins, one tablespoon capers and six minced canned mushrooms. Mix well while cooking for three minutes. Place the fish in a baking dish, then pour the sauce over the fish. Sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over all. Place the fish in a hot oven to bake for eight minutes. Remove and serve.
A small brown-roux sauce, gratinéed over fish. It comes from a book that assumes the fish has already been cooked, which is the point most likely to trip up a modern reader.
- The fish is already cookedEight minutes in the oven only sets the sauce and browns the cheese. Use fish that has been poached, steamed or baked beforehand — raw fillets thicker than about half an inch will not be done in that time.
- Gills and saltspoonsOne gill is half a cup, so the sauce is 1/2 cup hot milk and 1/4 cup fish stock over a tablespoon each of butter and flour. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon.
- Cut the cayenneA saltspoon of cayenne (roughly a quarter teaspoon) in a three-quarter-cup sauce is fierce by current taste. A pinch, tasted and adjusted, keeps the sauce in the range of a modern palate.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'hot oven' in this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. The dish is really a quick gratin: the top should colour before the sauce breaks or the fish overcooks.
- Brown the roux, but watch itTwo minutes over moderate heat gives a blond-to-light-brown roux, which is what the colour of the finished sauce depends on. In a thin modern pan it will darken faster than the instruction implies.
- Fish stockBottled clam juice, a light fish fumet, or the poaching liquid from the fish itself all work. Diluted chicken stock is a poor substitute here — the sauce is built on the fish flavour.
- Canned mushroomsThe original assumes small canned button mushrooms, drained. Sautéed fresh mushrooms, minced, give a cleaner result; skip them if you want the sauce sharper and more piquant.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup of sauce — enough for two generous portions or three modest ones. Double it for four.
À l'ancienne means simply "in the old style," a menu tag generally traced to the nineteenth century and applied loosely to preparations thought to belong to an earlier generation of cooking — usually meaning a flour-thickened sauce enriched and garnished rather than a light modern reduction. The structure here is orthodox: butter and flour cooked to a roux, moistened with milk and fish stock, then sharpened with gherkins and capers in the manner of the piquant and tartare family of sauces, and finished under heat with Parmesan as a gratin. Books of this era routinely wrote sauces as separate entries to be spooned over whatever fish had been poached that day, which is why this recipe never says what the fish is or how it was cooked. The reliance on canned mushrooms is a period marker of its own.