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Sauce Italienne
Heat a tablespoon butter in a small saucepan, add half a finely chopped white onion, brown for five minutes, then add one teaspoon flour and stir for half a minute. Moisten with one gill of demi-glace, one gill tomato sauce and half a gill white wine, adding twelve finely chopped mushrooms, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon each pepper and grated nutmeg. Mix well, then reduce to half the quantity, gently mixing quite frequently meanwhile, and use as directed.
A compound brown sauce built on demi-glace and mushrooms, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the base sauces were already standing on the stove. The measurements are period ones, and the mushroom quantity is by count rather than weight.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the liquid is 1/2 cup demi-glace, 1/2 cup tomato sauce and 1/4 cup white wine. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: half a teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon each of pepper and nutmeg.
- Twelve mushroomsThe count implies small mushrooms; twelve small buttons would come to somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 ounces, though the recipe gives no weight. Chop them fine, close to a duxelles, rather than slicing.
- Demi-glaceThe book takes for granted a reduced brown stock thickened with espagnole. A well-reduced, unsalted brown veal or beef stock, lightly bound, does the same work; commercial demi-glace concentrate is stronger and saltier, so dilute it and hold back the salt until the reduction is finished.
- Tomato sauceNot a seasoned pasta sauce. This means a plain cooked tomato purée, unsweetened and without garlic or herbs, or the classic tomato sauce of the same repertoire.
- The hinge is the reductionEverything depends on taking the volume down by half slowly, uncovered, stirring often. Rushing it over high heat scorches the tomato solids at the pan edge and the sauce turns bitter; too little reduction leaves it thin and raw-tasting from the wine.
- Salt timingSince the sauce loses half its volume, seasoning at the start concentrates. Add half the salt as written and correct at the end.
- NutmegA quarter teaspoon in a small sauce is assertive by current taste. Grate it fresh and consider starting with half that, adding more once the sauce has reduced and you can judge it.
- YieldAbout 2/3 to 3/4 cup finished sauce, a small quantity of the kind used to nap portions of veal, sweetbreads, poultry or grilled meat. The recipe itself does not say what it is to be used with; 'use as directed' refers the cook to another entry.
Sauce italienne belongs to the codified system of French brown sauces: a demi-glace lifted with white wine and tomato and carrying chopped mushrooms in the manner of a duxelles. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, was working within that French professional repertoire when he compiled this book. The name is a kitchen convention rather than a claim of Italian origin — in nineteenth-century French practice a dish labelled à l'italienne generally signalled the presence of tomato, and often mushrooms and herbs, much as portugaise pointed to tomato. That a sauce of this kind appears under "The World's Kitchen" says a good deal about how national labels worked in American hotel cooking of the period: the vocabulary was French even when the adjective was not, and a cook reading this entry was expected to have demi-glace and tomato sauce already made, needing only to finish the derivative.