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Shrimp Sauce
Mix in a small saucepan a tablespoon flour with a tablespoon melted butter, and heat for half a minute; then pour a gill of the fish liquor into this roux with three-quarters gill cream. Mix well, then drain the sauce through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan; add eight shrimps, cut into small pieces, and two tablespoons of sherry; season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper, lightly mix, then let boil for two minutes. Dilute an egg yolk in a tablespoon milk and add to the sauce; lightly mix while heating for one minute and serve.
A small French velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, meant to be spooned over poached or baked fish. The measures are pre-standardization but all translate cleanly.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is 1/2 cup, so three-quarters of a gill of cream is 6 tablespoons. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making the cayenne 1/8 teaspoon — assertive but not overwhelming in a cup of sauce.
- The hinge: the yolk must not boilOnce the yolk-and-milk mixture goes in, the sauce can only be warmed. Hold it below a simmer for that final minute; if it reaches a boil the yolk curdles and the sauce breaks into grains that no whisking will smooth.
- Fish liquorThe liquid from poaching the fish this sauce will dress, strained. Failing that, use a light fish stock or the reduced liquid from steaming shellfish. Bottled clam juice works but is saltier, so hold back on the salt until you taste.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job here; the point is to catch flour lumps before the shrimp go in, so strain while the base is still thin.
- Roux timingHalf a minute over heat cooks off almost nothing. Give the flour and butter two to three minutes over low heat so the sauce does not taste pasty, keeping it pale.
- The shrimpEight shrimp is only a few ounces, depending on size. Cooked shrimp, chopped small, is the likeliest intent, since the two-minute boil is aimed at marrying the sherry and stock rather than at cooking shellfish from raw.
- SherryDry or medium-dry, not cream sherry. The two minutes of boiling before the liaison takes the raw edge off the wine, so do not skip it.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce four portions of fish. Rewarm only gently if at all, since the yolk will split over direct heat; better to make it as the fish comes out of the oven.
Alexander Filippini spent many years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects that training: the recipes range very widely in origin, but the technique underneath is almost always French. This sauce follows the velouté pattern — roux, stock, cream — finished with a liaison of egg yolk, the classical method for giving a sauce body and sheen without further reduction. The instruction to strain through a chinois before adding the garnish is professional habit written down for domestic readers, as is the measuring in gills and saltspoons, which were still in ordinary use in American kitchens even as standardized cup-and-spoon measurement spread. Shrimp sauces of this kind appear as accompaniments to poached or baked white fish in cookery of the period.