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Sauce Normande
Heat in a small saucepan one tablespoon clarified butter; add one tablespoon flour, mix well with a wooden spoon until thoroughly heated, then add three-quarters of a gill white wine and strain in one and a half gills of the gravy of the fish in which it was cooked. Thoroughly mix, then briskly boil for ten minutes. Season with a saltspoon cayenne pepper, two saltspoons salt, adding a raw egg yolk and the juice of quarter of a sound lemon. Set the pan on a corner of the range and mix well with a wooden spoon until well thickened, or for two minutes, being careful not to allow it to boil. Strain through a napkin into another saucepan.
Have in a small sautoire six small whole fresh oysters, six whole canned shrimps, or the equivalent of lobster cut in small dice pieces, six small heads of canned mushrooms, and six very thin slices of truffles. Moisten with half gill of Maderia or white wine, then boil for five minutes. Add the sauce to this garnish. Heat up for four minutes longer, gently stirring meanwhile.
A classic fish velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, then loaded with a garnish. Two things decide whether it works: the yolk must never see a boil, and the oysters must go in last.
- The gillA gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup. Three-quarters of a gill of wine is 6 tablespoons, a gill and a half of fish liquor is 3/4 cup, and the half gill of Madeira is 1/4 cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is 1/4 teaspoon cayenne — assertive but not absurd for this quantity — and 1/2 teaspoon salt, which you should adjust to how salty the fish liquor already is.
- "Gravy of the fish"This means the poaching liquid the fish was cooked in, not a thickened gravy. If you have none, a light fish fumet stands in; a court bouillon reduced slightly is closer than bottled clam juice, which is much saltier.
- The yolk is the hingeOnce the yolk goes in, the sauce is a liaison and will curdle at a simmer. "A corner of the range" was the cool edge of a coal top; use the lowest heat or pull the pan off entirely and stir until it coats the spoon, about two minutes.
- Straining through a napkinA fine linen cloth wrung out in water, laid in a sieve, does the job of a chinois with muslin. It catches any thread of set yolk and gives a clean, glossy finish.
- Oyster timingFive minutes' boiling in wine and then four more in the sauce will toughen and shrink the oysters. Poach them in the Madeira for under a minute, just until the edges ruffle, and hold them; the mushrooms and lobster can take the longer heating.
- Sautoire and truffleA sautoire is a shallow straight-sided pan. Truffle here means preserved black truffle in thin slices; a spoonful of truffle peelings and their juice gives more perfume per pound than one fresh slice, and the dish is complete without it.
- YieldRoughly a cup of sauce with the garnish; the recipe gives no yield, and the garnish is counted out in sixes. Serve spooned over poached sole, turbot or brill at the table so the garnish shows.
Sauce normande belongs to the old French repertoire of fish velouté sauces: a white roux moistened with the poaching liquor, enriched with yolk and, in many versions, cream and mushroom cooking liquid. The name points to Normandy, whose seaboard supplied the sole, mussels and oysters of the classic sole à la normande, in which fillets are poached and then crowned with exactly this sort of garnish — oysters, shrimp or crayfish, mushroom caps and a fan of truffle. The elaborate garnish is the mark of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking rather than of Norman farmhouses, and it is one reason the sauce reads as expensive today: truffles and canned mushroom "heads" were pantry staples in a professional kitchen of the 1900s. Filippini, who spent years in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, wrote for readers he assumed had a range with a hot centre and a cool corner, and the instruction to move the pan aside for the yolk is the whole technique of a liaison compressed into one sentence.