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Sauce Finnoise
Cut into very small, square pieces a good-sized, sound green pepper. Place it in a saucepan with one-half ounce butter and heat on a brisk fire for two minutes, without browning. Then mix in one teaspoon flour; stir well. Pour in two gills very fresh red tomatoes pressed through a sieve. Season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon pepper and three saltspoons fine sugar. Mix well and let reduce to one-half, occasionally mixing. Add, little, by little, a good half ounce good butter, continually mixing while doing so until the butter is thoroughly melted. Remove and use as required.
A small quantity of butter-mounted tomato sauce, closer to a modern beurre monté finish than to a long-simmered tomato sauce. The measurements are old but unambiguous.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of sieved tomato is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons salt is 1/2 tsp, one saltspoon pepper is 1/4 tsp, three saltspoons sugar is 3/4 tsp. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon, and the recipe calls for it twice.
- The hinge: the finishing butterThe final butter must be worked in off the heat or over the barest warmth, a small piece at a time, while stirring constantly. If the sauce boils after the butter goes in, the emulsion breaks and you get a greasy slick on a thin tomato base.
- "Brisk fire"Medium-high heat, but only for the two minutes of sweating the pepper. The instruction "without browning" is the real constraint; drop the heat if the butter starts to colour.
- Tomatoes"Very fresh red tomatoes pressed through a sieve" means raw tomato pulp, skins and seeds removed. Out of season, a cup of good passata is the honest substitute, though it is already cooked down and will reduce faster and taste less bright.
- ReductionReducing one cup of thin tomato pulp to half a cup takes roughly 10-15 minutes in a small saucepan. The teaspoon of flour gives only a light thickening; its main job appears to be holding the reduced sauce together for the butter finish.
- The sugarThree quarters of a teaspoon in half a cup of finished sauce is noticeable. It was presumably meant to offset the acidity of the tomatoes; taste before adding all of it, and hold some back if your tomatoes are ripe.
- Yield and useAbout half a cup, which is two to four servings. It suits poached or pan-fried white fish, veal, or eggs, and it should be made shortly before serving since a mounted butter sauce will not reheat.
Classical French kitchens named sauces after nations as a shorthand for a single defining ingredient or gesture, and the naming was often loose: polonaise meant browned butter and crumbs, portugaise meant tomato, hollandaise meant an egg-and-butter emulsion regardless of any Dutch connection. Finnoise seems to belong to that habit rather than to any clearly documented Finnish dish. What is consistent here is the structure, which is thoroughly French: a brief sweat, a pinch of flour, a reduction, and a finish of raw butter beaten in to give gloss and body. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book with hundreds of such short entries, and the sauces in particular read as a working restaurant cook's file cards rather than as a survey of national cooking.