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Sauce Piquante, for Fish
For the piquante sauce served with the fresh beef tongue, boil together for five minutes one-quarter of a cupful of vinegar, one tablespoonful of chopped onion and one tablespoonful of sugar, and one pint of good brown sauce, two tablespoonfuls of finely chopped cucumber pickle and one tablespoonful of chopped capers. Let all simmer for about three minutes before serving.
A short reduction sauce built on a pint of brown sauce, of the sort a cook of 1900 would have had standing on the back of the stove. Everything depends on having that base ready.
- The brown sauce is the recipe"Good brown sauce" means a classic espagnole or a well-made brown gravy: browned roux moistened with beef stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. A pint is 2 cups. Bottled brown sauce of the HP type is a different product entirely and will not work here.
- Reduce the vinegar firstThe five-minute boil of vinegar, onion and sugar reads as a gastrique-style reduction, softening and concentrating the acid before the brown sauce goes in. The sentence as printed runs all the ingredients together, so this is an interpretation; boiling the whole pint down instead would give a thin, sharp sauce.
- Add the garnish lastThe recipe gives only a final three-minute simmer after the initial boil. Held back until that stage, pickle and capers keep more of their bite, though the text as printed does not clearly separate the additions.
- Cucumber pickleA plain sour cucumber pickle or cornichon, chopped fine. Sweet bread-and-butter pickles will fight the sugar already in the reduction.
- Title and text disagreeThe heading says fish, the instruction says fresh beef tongue. The book's brown-sauce base points to meat; with fish it would need a fish velouté or fumet-based brown sauce instead.
- CapersRinse brined capers before chopping, or the sauce will run salty once the brown sauce reduces further.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of finished sauce, enough for eight to ten servings of sliced tongue or roast meat.
Sauce piquante belongs to the family of French "small sauces" — a mother sauce, here espagnole, sharpened with an acid reduction and a chopped garnish. Escoffier's codification of the sauce system, set out in Le Guide Culinaire of 1903, falls broadly in the same era as this book. Boiled fresh beef tongue was ordinary, respectable middle-class fare then, cheap enough to be everyday and bland enough to need exactly this kind of vinegar-and-caper treatment. The name is simply French for "sharp" or "stinging" — the same word that gives the Louisiana sauce piquante its name, though that dish is a quite different thing, a tomato-and-cayenne stew base built on a dark roux.