Not just a sauce; an allemande by Johann Jakob Froberger
Marie Antonin Carême (author of the encyclopedic, L’Art de la Cuisine Française, 1834) categorized all sauces as belonging to one of the five “Mother Sauces“, Sauce Allemande is from velouté sauce, a blond sauce of veal (or chicken) stock thickened with a roux of butter and flour. Later on, Escoffier (A Complete Guide to Modern Cookery) added a few mother sauces and further normalized preparations. I can find no mention of Sauce Allemande before Menon (Nouveau Traité de la Cuisine, etc.), Marin (Les Dons de Comus) and Le Cuisinier Gascon – this isn’t terribly surprising, as there is a gap in French cookbooks between La Varenne’s mid 17th century works and these:
Menon Nouveau Traité de la Cuisine, 1739
Sauce à l’Allemande.
Mettez dans une casserole. une tranche de Jambon que vous faites suer & un peu attacher : mouillez-la avec du bouillon &c du coulis : faites-la bouillir: quand elle eft réduite & dégraiflëe, paflez-la au tamis Se mettez dedans des soyes & persil blanchi , & hachez câpres & anchois ; hachez deux ciboules entieres , deux pains de beurre de Vambre ; faites lier la sauce furie feu , qu’elle ne foit pas trop épaifle ; ôtez le ciboules & mettez-y un peu de gros poivre , & le jus d’un citron.
Put in a casserole. a slice of ham that you sweat & just attach: moisten it with broth: boil it: when it is reduced & deglazed, pass it to through a sieve. With the blanched parsley, mill & chop capers & anchovies, chop two whole onions, two kilos of fresh, sweet butter [literally butter from Vanvres, an 18th century delicacy]; add the butter to the sauce with the fire raging, when not too thick, remove the onions & put it a little coarse pepper, and the juice of a lemon.
A Mention of Sauce Allemand in Oeconomische (Oekonomisch-technologische) Encyclopädie, oder allgemeines ... By Johann Georg Krünitz 1811
The cook’s dictionary, and housekeeper’s directory by Richard Dolby, 1833
Sauce à Г Allemande.*—Put a slice of ham, and some champignons (previously dressed and shred) into a stewpan ; set it on the fire, and when the ham begins to stick, moisten it with stock and consamie, boil and reduce it ; then take off the fat, strain the sauce, and add to it some scalded parsley, two fat livers, capers, anchovies, scalíions, all chopped, add a bit of butter, put it again on the fire, and when of the requisite consistence, take out the scallions, put in some migncmette and lemon juice, and strain it for use.
La grande cuisine simplifiée,: art de la cuisine nouvelle mise à la portée … By P. C. Robert, 1845
Sauce allemande.
Mettez dans une casserole sur le feu 3 cuillerées de velouté, une de consommé, faites réduire à point; mettez-y une liaison de 2 jaunes d’œufs, gros comme un œuf de bon beurre, un petit jus de citron; passez votre sauce à l’élamine et tenez-la chaudement au bain-marie jusqu’au moment de l’employer.
Put in a saucepan on the heat 3 tablespoons of sauce velouté , 1 tablespoon consommé, just so; make a liaison with 2 egg yolks, as big as an egg of good butter, a little lemon juice, pass your sauce through a strainer [I think élamine is just a highly technical term for sieve] and keep it warm in a bain-marie until ready to use.
Escoffier, A Complete Guide to Modern Cookery, 1908
Allemande Sauce is not, strictly speaking,, a basic sauce. However, it is so often resorted to in the preparation of other sauces that I think it necessary to give it after the Veloutes, from which it is derived.
Quantities Required for One Quart.
The yolks of 5 eggs. the juice of a lemon.
1 pint of cold white stock. pint of mushroom liquor.
1 quart of Veloute, well despu-
mated. .
Mode of Procedure.—Put the various ingredients in a thick-bottomed saute”-pan and mix them carefully. Then put the pan on an open fire, and stir the sauce with a metal spatula, lest it burn at the bottom. When the sauce has been reduced to about one quart, add one-third pint of fresh cream to it, and reduce further for a few minutes. It should then be passed through a fine strainer into a tureen and kept moving until quite cold.
Prepared thus, the Allemande Sauce is ready for the prepara tion of the smaller sauces. Butter must only be added at the very last moment, for if it were buttered any earlier it would most surely turn. The same injunction holds good with this sauce when it is to be served in its original state; it should then receive a small addition of cream, and be buttered so that it may attain its required delicacy; but this addition of butter and cream ought only to be made at the last moment, and away from the fire. When a sauce thickened with egg yolks has any fat substance added to it, it cannot be exposed to a higher tempera ture than 140 degrees Fahrenheit without risking decomposition.
The Picayune Creole Cook Book, 1922
Sauce Allemande
4 Pounds of Raw Veal.
The Bones of a Chicken.
1 Gallon of Water.
1 Carrot.
1 Turnip.
Celery Tops.
2 Tablespoonfuls of Butter.
2 Spoonfuls of Lard. 1 Herb Bouquet of Thyme, Parsley, Bay Leaf. 1 Stalk of Celery. 2 Long Carrots.
Take the veal and the bones of the chicken and put into a pot with a gallon of water. Add the herb bouquet, tied together, and one chopped carrot, one turnip, chopped, celery tops, and other ingredients of a good “pot-au-feu.” Let all boil slowly for three hours until it is reduced onehalf. Then salt and pepper to taste. This will give a white broth or consommé blanc. When boiled to this point take off the fire and strain the broth into a jar. Now put two tablespoonfuls of butter and three of flour. into a saucepan together, letting the butter and flour blend nicely, without browning. Add all the broth to this, stirring slowly while on the flre. Add a good, strong bouquet of herbs, Ihyme, parsley and bay leaf, all tied together whole. Add two large carrots, letting all boil till reduced to one-half again. After this process, season to taste, and when It has reached the consistency of starch take it from the fire, strain, and let it get cool. This sauce is fine for all white meats and fish. When used for fish take one tablespoonful and moisten with a little fish broth. Set on the fire to heat, and add a pint of consommé or broth. This sauce Allemande will keep at least one month in our climate, in the ice box. If one prefers to make it as needed, follow the proportions of one tablespoonful of butter, two of flour, and one pint of boiling broth.
Murdoch’s youthful mind is as sharp and polished as a sword, but Conradi’s editing is not. Random footnotes pop up like glove puppets interrupting a soliloquy, to explain that “Je t’aime” means “I love you” and that Baudelaire is a French poet. There is no index, there are typos galore and a footnote that refers to the missing last page of Thompson’s final letter to Murdoch is itself tantalisingly unfinished — “how Frank signed off his last letter we will probably never”.
My review of Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires appears in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Here’s the first paragraph:
Over the past half-century, the extreme religious right, as documented in Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming, has transformed certain fidelities about faith into snaky traducements that resemble a spastic Tex Avery cartoon. This surrender of common sense has sullied the more sober connections between spirituality and American life, creating an exploratory reticence among novelists that has softly settled into the cultural berm. But Gail Godwin, one of American literature’s best-kept secrets, has quietly eked out a thoughtful bypass in which orthodoxy and human folly are often entangled.
You can also listen to my recent interview with Godwin on The Bat Segundo Show.
As widely reported, Amazon has removed all Macmillan titles from its site. This means that you won’t be able to buy new print or digital books from Paul Auster, John Scalzi, Richard Powers, or countless other authors bundled inside Macmillan’s many imprints through the Amazon website. The dispute, according to Macmillan CEO John Sargent, arose from a Thursday meeting Sargent had with Amazon, in which Sargent proposed new terms of sale for eBooks. Sargent desired to set the price for eBooks on an individual basis and under an agency model, sidestepping the austere $9.99 price point that Amazon has long insisted on for its Kindle titles. It is safe to say that Amazon, feeling particularly smug after reporting a profitable fourth quarter, felt compelled to not only have its cake and eat it too, but to throw numerous books beneath its oily guillotine. By the time Sargent returned to New York on Friday afternoon, the buy option for Macmillan’s books — both print and digital — had disappeared from Amazon’s website.
Bookstores have often refused to stock individual titles. (In 2004, Amazon.co.uk refused to carry Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud.) But it’s important to understand that not a single bookstore chain has ever discriminated against a publisher like this before. It’s also important to understand that the laws of vertical integration — most famously ruled on through United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., in which motion picture studios, who produced the movies and owned the theaters that they played in, were ordered to break up their monopolies — don’t necessarily apply. Amazon may not be owned by the publishers, but there are some indicators that the company controls 90% of the eBook market, effectively securing a monopoly.
While Sargent’s statement is the only real word that has emerged from this conflict (Amazon has remained mum), Amazon’s lack of transparency about the sudden removal of Macmillan books, as Michael Orthofer severely understates, is unacceptable, possibly violating federal price discrimination statutes that were guaranteed under the 1936 Robinson-Patnam Act. And it remains to be seen whether the Federal Trade Commission, which has recently devoted its resources to badgering bloggers, will investigate these troubling developments to determine if its creaky howitzers might be rolled out to combat this greater greed.
But these developments have caused some authors, viewing Amazon’s aggressive pricing as a grave threat to their livelihood, to take umbrage. John Scalzi writes, “If Amazon is willing to play chicken with my economic well-being — and the economic well-being of many of my friends — to lock up its little corner of the eBook field, well, that’s its call to make. But, you know what, I remember people who are happy to trample my ass into the dirt as they’re rushing to grab at cash.” Charles Stross writes, “Amazon, in declaring war on Macmillan in this underhand way, have screwed me, and I tend to take that personally, because they didn’t need to do that.”
UPDATE: I’ve just received word that the Amazon Kindle Team has addressed the situation in a forum, stating that “we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”
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Escoffier renamed it Sauce Blonde after World War I.
iPad…as family computer, as return to long form journalism, as taking over the textbook market, also entirely locked down, not a big iPhone … for old people….because it appeals to just about anyone. How to give a presention like Steve Jobs (no bulletpoints.) Jobs the auteur. Apple-free Engadget. Kim Morgan makes me want to see every movie she likes. Stag Heads With Human Faces. CD-Rom all over again. Caleb Crain on book pirates…and I’ve been thinking about this all week. The digital trashcan (a “boomeranged metaphor.”) Stefan Zweig is middlebrow. What’s next for Roger Hodge? Is Indie dead? Hilo microfiction contest. Interactive theater in Boston. Weekly World News on Google Books. Nick Denton’s blogs from minor to major league. At Sundance, New Routes to Finding an Audience. Globe Ideas on “cognitive fluency.” “I want the luxury of being able to push the pause button” – Douglas Rushkoff. Heather Havrikesky reviews his Frontline show “Digital Nation.” Ian Buruma on China/Google at WSJ on “Battling the Information Barbarians.” “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” – DFW. “The Internet is thrusting death upon me at a rate I’m not entirely equipped to deal with.” Boston is the “most challenging” large city to navigate in the United States. And congratulations Robin Sloan!
The coolest watch ever?
If you happen to have one you’re not using, please consider donating it to Significant Objects.
This is the second in an irregular series of posts aimed at raising awareness, among the Significant Objects readership, of the project curators’ wants and needs.
I recently had occasion to spend some time with Richard Hain and Makoto Matsumoto’s 2005 paper “Galois actions on fundamental groups and the cycle C – C^-,” which I’d always meant to delve into. It’s really beautiful! I cannot say I’ve really delved — maybe something more like scratched — but I wanted to share some very interesting things I learned.
Serre proved long ago that the image of the l-adic Galois representation on an elliptic curve E/Q is open in GL_2(Z_l), so long as E doesn’t have CM. This is a geometric condition on E, which is to say it only depends on the basechange of E to an algebraic closure of Q, or even to C.
What’s the analogue for higher genus curves X? You might start by asking about the image of the Galois representation G_Q -> GSp_2g(Z_l) attached to the Tate module of the Jacobian of X. This image lands in GSp_{2g}(Z_l). Just as with elliptic curves, any extra endomorphisms of Jac(X) may force the image to be much smaller than GSp_{2g}(Z_l). But the question of whether the image of rho must be open in GSp_2g(Z_l) whenever no “obvious” geometric obstruction forbids it is difficult, and still not completely understood. (I believe it’s still unknown when g is a multiple of 4…?) One thing we do know in general, though, is that when X is the generic curve of genus g (that is, the universal curve over the function field Q(M_g) of M_g) the resulting representation
is surjective.
Hain and Matsumoto generalize in a different direction. When X is a curve of genus greater than 1 over a field K, the Galois group of K acts on more than just the Tate modules (or l-adic H_1) of X; it acts on the whole pro-l geometric fundamental group of X, which we denote pi. So we get a morphism
What does it mean to ask this representation to have “big image”?
Well, just as in the Tate module story above, we can ask about the image of rho when K is the function field of M_g and X is the universal curve. Denote the image of this Galois representation in Out(pi) by G.
Then you might ask: for a curve X over a number field K, can we give a condition guaranteeing that the image of rho_{X/K} is open in G?
The theorem of Hain and Matsumoto doesn’t quite answer that question, but it makes an impressive stride in its direction. For each positive integer m, let L_m be the mth term of the lower central series of pi (so that L^2 = [pi,pi], L^3 =[pi,[pi,pi]] and so on.) Let G_m be the image of G in Out(pi/L^{m+1}). So G_1, for instance, is just GSp_{2g}(Z_l). Now you can ask the following “big image” question for each m:
(Q): Is the image of rho_{X/K} in Out(pi/L^{m+1}) open in G_m?
Now we’ve already remarked that the question is subtle for G_1. So let’s assume that (Q) has an affirmative answer for m=1. We also take g(X) >= 3. Then Hain and Matsumoto prove:
[HM, Th 9.1 a-b]: (Q) has a positive answer for m=2 if and only if it has a positive answer for all m >=2.
You might think of this as a non-abelian analogue of the theorem (for which see [IV, 3.4, Lemma 3] of Serre’s book “Abelian l-adic Representations and Elliptic Curves”) that an l-adic Galois representation is surjective if and only if it is surjective mod l^k, for some k depending only on the target group.
But wait, there’s more! One might ask whether, as in the case of elliptic curves, there’s a geometric condition distinguishing those X where (Q) holds from those where it doesn’t. It’s not hard to check, by the way, that (Q) isn’t always the case! Once again, extra endomorphisms can force the image of Galois can be smaller; for instance, when X is a hyperelliptic curve the image of rho_{X/K} will always be smaller than the generic image. (Did you remember I said the genus of X was at least 3…?)
Now we come to the main theme of Hain and Matsumoto’s paper. Choose a basepoint x on X. Then the Abel-Jacobi map associated to X gives you an embedding of X in the abelian g-fold Jac(X). Consider the algebraic cycle Z = [X] – [-1]^*[X], where [-1] is multiplication by -1 on Jac(X). The cohomology class of Z in H^{2g-2}(J(X),Z_l(g-1)) is trivial; thus, Z has a well-defined cycle class in H^1(G_K, H^{2g-3}(J(X),Z_l(g-1)). We move this class over to H^1(G_K, H^3(J(X),Z_l(2))) by Poincare duality. Now H^3(J(X)) is just wedge^3 H^1(X), and we can put a copy of H^1(X) inside H^3(J(X)) by wedging it with the symplectic form in wedge^2 H^1(X). The quotient of H^3(J(X)) by this copy of H^1(X) is an l-adic Galois module we call V, which is pure of weight 1.
We can project our cohomology class down to V to get a class nu in H^1(G_K, V), which turns out to be independent of the choice of basepoint. Now the theorem of Hain and Matsumoto says:
[H-M, Th 9.2 c] (Q) has a positive answer for all m >= 2 if and only if it has a positive answer for m = 1 and the class nu has infinite order.
Note that this is indeed a geometric condition — at least in the sense that if it holds after replacing K with a finite extension, it holds for K. Unlike “non-CM,” though, it’s not clear to make sense of it for a curve with transcendental moduli; just one more indication that you should really think of such an object, not as a curve, but as a family of curves over number fields, the dimension of the family being the transcendence degree of the moduli. (In this sense, maybe nu should be thought of as always infinite-order when the moduli of X are transcendental, just as an elliptic curve with transcendental j-invariant is automatically non-CM…?)
I’ll leave it as an exercise to check that nu vanishes when X is hyperelliptic.
One question remains: what made me go back to Hain and Matsumoto’s paper? It was the beautiful lecture series Shou-Wu Zhang gave here at Madison last month about his work on the Arakelov-theoretic properties of the Gross-Schoen cycle. And the Gross-Schoen cycle, as Hain and Matsumoto point out (Remark 1.1 d) is just three times nu! If time permits I’ll blog about his talks, too; but maybe there’s no need, since you can always read Terry Tao’s take on a similar lecture series at UCLA.
I recently had the incredibly enviable task of doing the cover for Weird Tales’ Steampunk Spectacular. I did a wicked robot lady that referances several stories inside. Weird Tales rocks it, so be sure to preorder
Here’s yet another twist on adding an invented narrative to a seemingly low-value thingamabob:
Designer Matt Brown bought a pack of 15 plastic horses for a couple of bucks. Then he dreamed up a name for each one, then packaging, reconceptualizing his two-dollar purchase as a line of toys, Night Horses, that were introduced in the late 1980s, and flopped.
Hey, remember Night Horses? (No, you don't.)
I love it!
More recently Brown has embarked on another project, turning some toy cars into another failed product line. They’ll be retroactively rebranded as Throttle Dukes. More here.
Throttle Dukes, to be.
Is this more evidence of the “significant objects meme” Josh has detected? I don’t know.
What I really want to know is: How can we work with this guy? He’s great! “I like taking things that are basically worthless and neglected and turning them into something that people could enjoy again,” he writes. Combine that with my longstanding interest in imaginary brands, and you can see why I’m so into it.
(Via Metafilter, by the way, where Brown was referred to as a “design fiction enthusiast.”)
