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Sauce, Genoise
Heat tablespoon melted butter in saucepan, add one finely sliced onion, three finely chopped shallots, half bean crushed garlic, branch parsley, small sprig thyme, bay leaf and one clove, gently brown for five minutes, moisten with a gill claret, let reduce until nearly dry, pour in one and half gills demi-glace, mix well, then boil for five minutes, adding half teaspoon anchovy essence, two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well, strain through cheesecloth and use as required.
A classical brown sauce built on demi-glace and red wine, meant to be spooned over fish rather than meat. The whole point is the reduction: the wine must go almost dry before the demi-glace goes in, or the finished sauce tastes thin and sour.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 1/2 cup, so the claret is 1/2 cup and the demi-glace 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, giving 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne.
- That much cayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in roughly a cup of sauce is aggressive by current taste. Add a pinch, taste at the end, and build up.
- "Half bean crushed garlic"'Bean' is Filippini's usual unit for garlic and most likely means a piece about the size of a bean, so at most half a small clove. Either way the sauce is not meant to read as garlicky.
- ClaretClaret means a dry red Bordeaux or anything in that register: medium-bodied, tannic, not fruity. Avoid jammy high-alcohol reds, which turn syrupy and sweet when reduced this far.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown stock, classically espagnole reduced with brown veal stock, and there is no shortcut worth taking. Good tubbed or frozen demi-glace from a butcher works; bouillon cubes or gravy granules do not, since the body of the sauce comes largely from the gelatin in the stock.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled anchovy extract, thin and salty. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste is the closest current stand-in; if using fish sauce instead, start with a quarter teaspoon, as it is saltier and less rounded.
- Reduce until nearly dryThe wine should reduce to a glossy film in the pan bottom, two or three tablespoons at most. Stop short of scorching, since the onion and shallot sugars catch quickly once the liquid goes.
- StrainingCheesecloth is fine, but a fine chinois or sieve pressed with a ladle gets more out of the aromatics. Discard the solids, then check the seasoning: salt concentrates during the second reduction.
- YieldAbout 3/4 cup of finished sauce, enough for four servings of fish. It reheats well and thickens as it cools because of the gelatin.
Sauce génoise belongs to the French classical repertoire of brown sauces adapted to fish, a category that puzzles modern cooks used to keeping red wine and seafood apart. It is closely tangled with sauce genevoise, and it is often said that the two names are the same sauce, one being a corruption of the other, with Geneva rather than Genoa as the original reference; nineteenth-century kitchens used both spellings for versions built on red wine, aromatics and a brown reduction, sometimes with fish stock, sometimes with veal-based demi-glace as here. The anchovy essence is the tell of the fish pairing, a bottled savory extract common in period larders that did the work that a splash of fish sauce or a spoon of anchovy paste does now. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, includes this among a long run of similar sauces, and the instructions assume a stockpot of demi-glace is simply on hand.