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Piquante Sauce
Cut up about half an ounce of onions and fry in a couple of spoonfuls of good vinegar. Cook dry, but great care must be used to see that it does not brown too much or scorch. Add to this three gills of brown sauce, a half cup of broth, then put in one tablespoonful of cucumber and a little less of parsley, both chopped and cooked slowly twenty minutes.
A classic sauce piquante built on the old brown-sauce foundation: an onion-and-vinegar reduction let down with espagnole and stock, finished with something sharp and something green. The instructions are compressed, so a few things need spelling out.
- Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of brown sauce is 1½ cups. With the half cup of broth the sauce starts at about two cups and reduces from there.
- Brown sauceIn period usage this generally means a brown roux moistened with brown stock and simmered down, at its most elaborate the espagnole of the French kitchen. A kitchen of this sort kept some standing; if you are not making one, a well-reduced demi-glace or a good beef stock thickened with brown roux is the nearest equivalent.
- Half an ounce of onionsRoughly two tablespoons chopped, or a shallot's worth. It is a seasoning, not a body ingredient, which is why scorching it ruins the sauce.
- "Fry in vinegar" and cook dryThe hinge of the recipe. The onion sweats in the vinegar until the pan is nearly dry, concentrating the acid without leaving raw sharpness. Keep the heat low and stop while the onion is still pale — browned or scorched onion turns the finished sauce bitter, and there is nothing in the recipe to hide it.
- CucumberIn sauce piquante the cucumber is usually the pickled kind — gherkins or cornichons — rather than fresh, though this recipe does not say. Fresh cucumber will water the sauce down; a tablespoon of finely chopped gherkin is the likelier reading.
- Twenty minutes' cookingThe parsley and gherkin go in and the whole simmers gently. Add half the parsley at the start and the rest in the last minute if you want the colour to hold.
- Seasoning and finishNo salt or pepper is specified; the brown sauce may have been expected to carry it. Taste at the end; if the vinegar has softened too far, a few drops more sharpen it back. A knob of cold butter swirled off the heat will give the sauce gloss, though the recipe does not call for it.
- YieldStarting at about two cups and losing some to the twenty minutes' simmering; how far it reduces is not stated. Sauce piquante is conventionally served with pork, leftover roast beef, tongue, or reheated meat.
Sauce piquante is one of the standard small sauces of the French repertoire — a derivative of espagnole, defined by a reduction of vinegar with shallot or onion and finished with chopped gherkins and herbs. Its purpose in a nineteenth-century household was frankly economic: acid and pickle make cold or reheated meat palatable. That this book gives it in a few lines, assuming the reader already has brown sauce standing by, reflects the logic of a repertoire in which the mother sauces were made in quantity and the small sauces were variations struck off them as needed.