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White Sauce
(Salsa bianca) This sauce can be served with boiled asparagus or with cauliflower. The ingredients are 1/4 lb. of butter, a tablespoonful of flour, a tablespoonful vinegar, one yolk of egg, salt and pepper, broth or water in sufficient quantity.
Put first on the fire the flour with half the butter and when it begins to be browned pour over it the broth or the water little by little, stirring with the wooden spoon and adding the rest of the butter and the vinegar without making the water boil too much. When taken off the fire add the yolk of the egg, stir and serve. 55
A loose, buttery egg-thickened sauce closer to French sauce bâtarde than to a modern béchamel. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the roux pale, and adding the yolk off the heat.
- The hinge: the yolk goes in off the fireThe pan must be off the burner and below a simmer when the yolk is stirred in, or it will scramble into threads. Ladle a little of the hot sauce into the yolk first, then return the mixture to the pan and stir until it thickens slightly.
- Do not brown the rouxThe instruction to cook the flour and butter "until it begins to be browned" contradicts the name; a browned roux gives a tan sauce with a toasted flavour. Cook the flour in the butter two or three minutes over medium heat, only until it stops smelling raw and foams.
- Butter quantityA quarter pound is about 115 g, which against a single tablespoon of flour is a very high fat ratio. Half the butter goes into the roux; the recipe adds the rest along with the liquid and vinegar as the sauce cooks, which enriches it much as a French cook mounts a sauce with butter.
- Liquid is unmeasured"Broth or water in sufficient quantity" is genuinely open. Start with about 1 cup (240 ml) of light chicken broth added a little at a time; with only a tablespoon of flour the body comes mostly from the butter and yolk, so the sauce will stay pourable rather than coating.
- VinegarUse white wine vinegar rather than cider or malt, which will colour and dominate it. A tablespoon in this volume is assertive; add half, taste at the end, and adjust.
- Heat control"Without making the water boil too much" is a warning against letting it boil hard; keep it at a gentle simmer. Once the yolk is in, boiling will curdle the sauce outright.
- Yield and servingMade with about a cup of liquid, this comes to roughly a cup and a half, enough for four servings of asparagus or a medium cauliflower. Serve immediately; it will not hold or reheat well, and it thickens noticeably as it cools.
Salsa bianca is the Italian name for the family of pale butter-and-flour sauces finished with egg yolk and an acid. Recipes of this type circulate widely in nineteenth-century Italian domestic cookery, where boiled asparagus and cauliflower were common vegetables and a warm sauce a usual dressing for them; Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), among the most influential of Italian household manuals, carries close relatives. The Italian Cook Book, compiled by Maria Gentile and published in New York in 1919, was aimed at American readers meeting Italian cooking through immigrant kitchens.