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Champagne Sauce
Use one tablespoonful of butter. Mix thoroughly with same of flour; place on the fire in a saucepan and stir constantly until the ingredients are an amber brown. Pour into this half a pint of boiling gravy, the liquor in which pieces of lean meat have been boiled, it being quite rich. Add this gravy slowly and stir all the time. As soon as it boils up season with pepper and salt, then strain. To this add half a cupful of champagne and erve.
A brown roux sauce finished with wine — essentially a small espagnole, built on strong meat broth rather than a proper stock reduction. It comes together in about ten minutes once the broth is hot.
- The hinge: add the champagne off the heatAdding the champagne last -- The wine goes in after straining, and the recipe gives it no further cooking, so on the plain reading it is not meant to boil again. Sustained heat would drive off the wine's aromatics.
- Half a pint means one cupAn American half-pint is 8 fl oz. With only a tablespoon each of butter and flour, and browned flour thickening less than pale, this is a lightly bound sauce rather than a thick one, loosened further by the half cup of wine.
- "Boiling gravy"Not thickened gravy in the modern sense: this is the broth from boiling lean meat, which the recipe says should be "quite rich." A good low-sodium beef stock reduced by a third stands in; season only at the end, since reduction concentrates salt.
- Amber brown rouxButter and flour over medium heat, stirred constantly, take five to eight minutes to reach the colour of a copper coin. Past that it darkens fast and turns bitter, and browned flour thickens noticeably less than pale.
- Adding hot to hotBoiling liquid into a hot roux will sputter and can seize into lumps if dumped in. A ladleful at a time, worked smooth before the next, is what "add slowly and stir all the time" is protecting against.
- The champagneAny dry sparkling wine works, and flat leftover bottle-ends are fine — the bubbles do nothing here. Avoid anything labelled demi-sec or extra dry, which will read as sweet against the browned flour.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a half of sauce. The recipe names no dish to serve it with; keep it warm over hot water rather than direct heat.
- "Erve"A typesetting slip for "serve" in the original, left as printed.
Champagne sauce belongs to the run of wine-finished brown sauces that French restaurant cookery pushed into English-language household books through the nineteenth century — the same family as Madeira, sherry and port sauces, where a roux-based gravy is given its character by a splash of something expensive at the last moment. Recipes like this one sold the promise that a hotel dining-room flourish could be managed at home with a cup of stock and a tablespoon of flour. The instruction to build the sauce on "the liquor in which pieces of lean meat have been boiled" is the older, thriftier tradition showing through — nothing purpose-made, just the pot liquor already on the stove.