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Of Sauces: Francatelli
With the following sauces, besides the simpler forms of espagnole and velouté, much may be accomplished at home: cream béchamel, sauce piquante, sauce bordelaise, maître-d'hôtel and béarnaise, hollandaise, sauce au vin blanc, sauce au beurre noir (plain, or with shallots and parsley added), tomato sauce and its special form à la Richelieu, and, finally, Francatelli's sauce Number 65 for mutton and darkfleshed game.¹ If, apart from those enumerated, madame be an artist in the fashioning of sauce tartare, the mayonnaise and its shadings, and a plain French salad dressing, all will be lovely sailing. What's sauce for the goose, however, is not necessarily sauce for the gander, and vice versa. Women will prefer the cream béchamel, mayonnaise, and Francatelli, and the sterner sex will like them all.
It may not prove entirely without profit if to these be added sauce à la Schönberg, which harmonises not only with halibut, flounder, sea-bass, and sole, but with chicken-breasts and white-fleshed game-birds as well, when one desires a change from the usual modes of preparation: “Sauce à la Schönberg. Make a roux of a tablespoon of butter and flour, brown slightly, add two shallots finely minced, and a pint of chicken broth, three tablespoons of tomato sauce, a small bay-leaf, two cloves, some finely minced parsley, a teaspoon of cognac, and a little white wine. Season with salt and pepper, and strain. Then add a half can 1 The recipes for sauce a la Richelieu and Francatelli's sauce are presented respectively in the following and in a previous chapter. of mushrooms, slice and brown them in a little butter with a few dice of sweetbreads previously cooked, and, just before removing from the range, the yolk of an egg and a half cup of cream."
The professional chef may possibly criticise it, mesdames the " 'Compleat' Housewives" will discover in it a fragrant note of satisfaction.
Will new sauces continue to be invented? Assuredly; of culinary as well as other novelties there will always be an abundant supply, however bizarre or lacking in excellence compared with the old. But in new dishes it will be new combinations for the most part, varying but little from the classics and those already known, rather than any distinctly novel forms of superior merit, such as have been recently evolved in floriculture, for instance. For the art of cookery is of ancient time, while the evolution of the flower, especially the floral queen, the rose, is comparatively new; and where the one has still untold possibilities, the other has well-nigh attained its full tide of savour and perfection, at least in theory and understanding, if not nearly so often in practice as were to be desired. An extended disquisition, redolent of truffles and odorous of the herb-garden, might be devoted to the subject of sauces, of which Charles Ranhofer in his recent manual, "The Epicurean," presents two hundred and forty-six. But this were invading the practical domain of the cookery books, and wandering too far from the lines of the subject under consideration -the history and province of Gastronomy.
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The passage is mostly commentary, but it carries one complete working recipe: sauce à la Schönberg, a brown-tinged velouté-style sauce finished with a liaison and garnished with mushrooms and sweetbreads. A few of its instructions assume knowledge the text does not spell out.
- The hinge: the liaison must not boilThe egg yolk and half cup of cream go in off the heat, or with the pan barely steaming, and the sauce is served at once. Bring it back to a simmer and the yolk curdles into threads that no amount of whisking will smooth out.
- Roux proportions"A tablespoon of butter and flour" means a tablespoon of each. Cooked to a light blond and slackened with a pint of broth, that is a thin sauce by design; the yolk and cream do most of the thickening at the end.
- "Brown slightly"Two to three minutes over moderate heat, until the roux smells of toasted nuts and takes a pale tan. Anything darker will fight the delicate fish and chicken breast the sauce is meant for.
- Tomato sauceNot the modern jarred pasta sauce. A period tomato sauce would have been a cooked tomato preparation, plainer and less sweet than the jarred product and without garlic or oregano; passata or plain tomato purée is the closer substitute. Three tablespoons is a colouring and seasoning, not a flavour base.
- Half a can of mushroomsCanned button mushrooms; period tin sizes varied, so the quantity cannot be pinned down exactly. A few ounces of fresh mushrooms, sliced and browned in butter, will stand in.
- SweetbreadsThe text says only "previously cooked," and does not specify which sort. Sweetbreads are normally soaked, blanched, peeled and poached before being diced. They must be ordered from a butcher and used within a day or two. The sauce works without them if the mushroom garnish is increased.
- Order of operationsStrain the sauce before the garnish goes in, not after; the shallot, bay, cloves and parsley are aromatics to be discarded. The mushrooms and sweetbreads are browned separately in butter and stirred into the strained sauce.
- YieldSomething over a pint once the cream and garnish are in, allowing for what is lost in straining and reduction.
The Pleasures of the Table is George Ellwanger's 1902 survey of gastronomy rather than a cookbook, which is why a working recipe appears here embedded in an essay. The two authorities he leans on were the reigning ones of the era: Charles Elm\to to Queen Victoria, whose Modern Cook numbers its recipes sequentially throughout, and Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico's in New York, whose The Epicurean (1894) really does run to hundreds of sauces. The odd swerve into roses is not padding: Ellwanger came from the Rochester nursery family Ellwanger & Barry and wrote on gardens as often as on food, so the comparison of a mature culinary art with a still-developing horticultural one was his own ground. Sauce rberg is not part of the classical repertory and Ellwanger gives no source for it; his half-apologetic line that "the professional chef may possibly criticise it" suggests a private or household formula, of the kind that circulated in print long before anyone thought to record who devised them.