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Sauce, Genevoise
Place in a saucepan half a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, half ounce raw, lean ham, cut into small pieces, one bay leaf, one sprig thyme, one clove, a teaspoon whole black pepper, one clove garlic and two branches parsley, adding one tablespoon butter; neatly brown the vegetables for ten minutes, occasionally stirring. Add one gill claret and one gill of the fish broth. Let reduce to half the quantity, then pour in one and a half gills demi-glace; mix a little and let slowly boil for twenty minutes, strain the sauce through a cheesecloth into a bowl and use as required.
A classic reduction sauce built on a wine-and-mirepoix base, thickened only by the demi-glace. Nothing about it is difficult, but the quantities are small and the vocabulary is dated.
- GillsOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So the recipe wants 1/2 cup claret, 1/2 cup fish broth and 3/4 cup demi-glace, yielding roughly a cup of finished sauce.
- ClaretNineteenth-century English usage for dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works; avoid anything oaky or sweet, since the liquid is reduced by half and every flaw concentrates.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, and the body of the sauce — nothing further is added here to thicken it, though demi-glace is itself built on a roux-thickened espagnole. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate is acceptable; a thin canned gravy will leave the sauce watery no matter how long you boil it.
- Fish brothFumet made from the trimmings of the fish being served. Simmer bones and heads 20 to 30 minutes at most; longer extraction turns the stock bitter and gluey.
- Browning the mirepoixThe ten minutes of browning is where the color and depth come from. Keep the heat moderate and stir — scorched carrot or garlic will carry through the strainer as an acrid note you cannot correct later.
- Raw lean hamHalf an ounce of unsmoked or lightly cured ham, prosciutto or pancetta trimmings. Heavily smoked supermarket ham will dominate a sauce this size.
- StrainingPress the solids gently against the cheesecloth rather than wringing it out; forced-through vegetable pulp clouds the sauce. Skim any fat that rises after straining.
- FinishingThe original stops at the strainer. Off the heat, a knob of cold butter swirled in and a correction for salt bring it into line with modern palates.
Genevoise is one of the standard brown fish sauces of the French professional repertoire, served almost always with salmon or trout — the combination of red wine, fish fumet and veal demi-glace is unusual enough that it exists mainly for oily river fish. The name is generally traced to Geneva, though the sauce has also often been linked to Genoa, and which way the borrowing ran is disputed rather than settled. Its appearance in an American "international" cookbook reflects how thoroughly hotel and restaurant kitchens in New York had adopted the French sauce system: the recipe still assumes access to demi-glace, the labor-intensive reduced brown stock.