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Yellow Sauce
(Salsa gialla) This sauce is especially good for boiled fish, and the quantities indicated below are sufficient for a piece of fish or a whole fish weighing about a pound.
Put on the fire in a little saucepan one teaspoonful of flour and two ounces of butter, and when the flour begins to be browned, pour over it little by little one cup of the broth of the fish, that is to say of the water in which the fish has been boiled. When you see that the flour does not rise in the boiling water, take away the sauce from the flour and pour over two tablespoonfuls of olive oil and the yolk of an egg, stirring and mixing everything well. Squeeze in the sauce half a lemon and season generously with salt and pepper. Let it cool and then pour over the fish that is to be served with a sprig of parsley.
This sauce must have the appearance of a cream and must not be too liquid, in order that it may remain attached to the fish. 56
A lightly thickened, egg-enriched fish sauce served cool rather than hot. The English here is a stiff translation from the Italian, and one sentence in particular has to be read past before the method makes sense.
- The mistranslated line"Take away the sauce from the flour" should read "take the saucepan from the fire." The yolk and oil go in off the heat, or the yolk scrambles and the sauce breaks.
- Butter to flourTwo ounces of butter (4 tablespoons) to one teaspoon of flour is not a roux in the usual sense. The flour appears to be there mainly to hold the sauce together; body comes from the butter, oil and yolk. There is no need to even up the ratio.
- "When the flour does not rise"This appears to be the cue that the flour has stopped floating to the surface and has cooked into the liquid. The recipe gives no timing; keep it at the boil as written and judge by eye.
- The brothSimply the water the fish was poached in, as the recipe says. A bland, unseasoned poaching liquid will give a duller sauce, though the recipe does season generously with salt and pepper at the end.
- The egg yolkOne yolk is stirred into a sauce that is hot but no longer boiling, then the whole thing is cooled and served cold, so the yolk is not reliably brought to a safe temperature. If you are cooking for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use a pasteurised yolk.
- ConsistencyThe instruction to keep it creamy and clinging is the point of the dish. If it slackens as it cools, whisk in a little more oil drop by drop; if it stiffens, loosen with a spoonful of the fish broth.
- YieldAbout a cup of sauce, enough to dress the pound of fish the recipe specifies.
Salsa gialla means simply "yellow sauce," the colour coming from the egg yolk and the olive oil rather than from saffron or any spice. It belongs to a family of cold or tepid Italian sauces for boiled fish that sit between a butter sauce and a mayonnaise: enough cooked starch and broth to give substance, enough raw yolk and oil to give the gloss and cling the last sentence insists on. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was assembled for American households, and much of it is generally traced back to Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, whose plain domestic tone survives here even through an awkward translation. The habit of reusing the poaching liquid rather than reaching for a separate stock is characteristic of that tradition, where a boiled fish and its sauce were understood as one operation, not two.""}