Piquante Sauce
For sauce piquante add to the drawn butter sauce onehalf tablespoonful of vinegar, one-half tablespoonful of onion juice, one tablespoonful of chopped pickles, one tablespoonful of chopped olives, one-quarter teaspoonful of grated onions and a dash of paprika.
This is a finishing formula rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a cup of drawn butter sauce on the stove. The quantities are small because they are meant to season, not transform.
- Drawn butter sauceIn American books of this era "drawn butter" is generally not clarified butter but a light flour-thickened sauce: butter and flour cooked together, thinned with hot water or light stock, whisked smooth and often finished with another lump of butter off the heat. The recipe does not state how much of it these additions are meant to season.
- Add the acid last, off the heatVinegar and onion juice stirred into a flour-thickened sauce over direct heat will thin it and can make it taste raw. Pull the pan aside, whisk them in, then return it just long enough to warm through.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; half a tablespoon takes a small onion. The recipe then asks for a quarter teaspoon of grated onion as well, which is the pulp itself — harmless to skip if you have used the juice.
- PicklesThe recipe does not specify; sour cucumber pickle, chopped fine, suits the sauce best. Sweet pickle will make it cloying.
- OlivesPresumably green olives in brine, pitted and chopped. Rinse them if they are heavily salted.
- PaprikaA dash here means sweet paprika for colour and a faint warmth. Smoked paprika, which would dominate the sauce, is unlikely to be what was intended.
Sauce piquante is the plainest possible name — French for "sharp sauce" — and the family it belongs to is old, built on the principle that a acidic, pickle-laced sauce answers dark or gamy meat. The classical French version reduces vinegar and shallots, adds a brown sauce, and finishes with chopped gherkins and herbs; what appears here is the American household simplification, grafted onto drawn butter, the all-purpose flour-thickened sauce that turn-of-the-century cookbooks treated as a base to be varied a dozen ways. That approach — one mother sauce, a page of short paragraphs each beginning "for sauce so-and-so, add" — explains why the entry gives no method at all. The reader was expected to have made the drawn butter already.