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Brown Sauce
Put two ounces of butter into a stew-pan, with a quarter of a pound of lean bacon or ham cut fine, and two pounds of lean beef cut into strips. Add a little water, two cloves, pepper, salt and one bay-leaf. Set it over the fire, stirring constantly, until it is brown and rich. Then add two quarts of water, and when it boils, let it simmer slowly for an hour and a half. Strain through a sieve, and it is ready for use.
This is a meat glaze-style brown stock rather than a thickened sauce: no flour, no roux, just beef and bacon browned hard and simmered down. It stands or falls on the colour you build in the first fifteen minutes.
- The hinge is the browningThe "little water" added at the start is not for stewing; it is there to keep the milk solids and meat juices from scorching while they caramelise, and it should cook away entirely before the two quarts go in. Keep the pan wide and the heat moderate, scraping the brown film off the bottom as it forms, until the meat is genuinely dark and the pan smells nutty.
- Quantities and yieldTwo pounds of beef, four ounces of bacon and two quarts of water will reduce noticeably over ninety minutes of slow simmering, leaving perhaps 1 to 1.5 quarts depending on how closely the pan is covered. That is more than a single sauce needs; halve it if you only want enough for one dinner.
- "Lean bacon or ham"Period bacon was generally dry-salt cured and saltier than modern wet-cured supermarket bacon; smoking varied a good deal from region to region. Unsmoked streaky bacon, pancetta or a piece of gammon is the safest choice here, as heavily smoked bacon will dominate everything the sauce touches.
- Cut of beef"Lean beef cut into strips" leaves the choice open; shin or leg suit a stock of this kind, giving body from connective tissue. Strips rather than cubes also expose more surface to the pan, which helps the browning along.
- Salt lateSalt is listed with the aromatics, but the liquid loses a good part of its volume during the simmer and the bacon contributes its own. Season lightly at the start and correct after straining.
- Skim and degreaseTwo ounces of butter plus bacon fat leaves a considerable slick. Skim during the simmer, then chill the strained stock and lift the set fat off the top — the sauce keeps far better without it.
- Calling it a sauceAs written this is a foundation. To use it as a sauce in the nineteenth-century sense, reduce it further or thicken it with a brown roux or a little arrowroot slaked in cold water.
- KeepingRefrigerated, four days; frozen in small portions, several months. The book assumes a cool larder and near-daily use, which no modern kitchen has.
Brown sauce in this sense descends from the French *espagnole* and the *jus* of professional kitchens, filtered through English and American domestic cookery until it became simply the brown liquid a good cook was expected to have standing by. A stock like this one assumes that a household would make a large batch and draw on it all week for gravies, ragouts, hashes and made dishes. The inclusion of bacon or ham is characteristic and practical: cured pork supplies salt, fat and savour that lean beef alone cannot. The single bay leaf and two cloves mark this as a restrained, plain-cooking version; grander versions of the same sauce called for veal, carrot, onion, wine and a long list of herbs.