Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef Sauce, Piquante
Beef Sauce, Piquante
Put one ounce of butter and four table-spoonfuls of vinegar into a stewpan with four finely-chopped shallots, and stir over the fire with a wooden spoon till the butter becomes clear, then add one ounce of flour and stir three or four minutes; take one pint of bouillon or common stock broth, a little colouring, and one-eighth of an ounce of pepper; boil all together fifteen minutes, then add one table-spoonful of chopped gherkins and one of minced parsley, boil up, skim, and serve in a sauce tureen as an accompaniment to boiled beef. Time, twenty minutes. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A sharp, roux-thickened brown sauce for boiled beef, built on the old pattern of reducing vinegar and shallots before the flour goes in. Almost everything translates directly; only the seasoning weight and the "colouring" need thought.
- Reduce first, then flourThe hinge is "stir till the butter becomes clear" — you are cooking the vinegar down until the shallots soften and the fat separates out bright rather than cloudy. Add the flour before that point and the sauce keeps a raw, thin acidity that fifteen minutes of simmering will not remove.
- The pepperAn eighth of an ounce is about 3.5 g, roughly a teaspoon and a half of ground black pepper in a pint of sauce. That is deliberate for a piquante, but it is assertive by current taste; start with half and correct at the end.
- "A little colouring"Victorian kitchens kept a bottle of browning — burnt sugar caramel, sold commercially or made at home. A few drops of gravy browning does the same job, or simply let the roux go a shade darker before the stock goes in.
- Bouillon or common stockStock of the period was typically the liquor from simmering meat and bones, lightly seasoned at most. Unsalted beef stock is the right substitute; if using a commercial stock, season only after the sauce has reduced.
- VinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar. Malt vinegar was common in English kitchens of the period, though cookery books often specified wine vinegar for sauces. White wine vinegar is milder and cleaner if you want the shallots to read more clearly.
- GherkinsSmall cucumbers pickled sharp in vinegar, cornichon-style, not sweet American-style pickles. Sweet ones will unbalance a sauce whose whole point is acidity.
- Skim, and mean itFifteen minutes of simmering will throw butter and starch scum to the surface. Draw the pan half off the heat so the fat collects on one side and lift it off — a greasy piquante sauce tastes flat.
- QuantityOne pint of stock yields roughly 500 ml of finished sauce, enough for the six to eight the book claims, served in a tureen alongside rather than poured over.
Sauce piquante belongs to the family of vinegar-and-shallot brown sauces codified in French practice as a derivative of espagnole, and English cookery books took it up through the nineteenth century. Its purpose here is functional: boiled beef, particularly the salted brisket and silverside that filled Victorian households, is mild and moist and wants something acidic and pungent beside it, which is why so many nineteenth-century tables paired boiled meats with pickles, mustard, horseradish or a sauce like this one built on vinegar and gherkins. The instruction to serve it separately in a tureen reflects the service of the period, where sauces were passed rather than plated. The technique — moisten, simmer, finish with something chopped and raw-ish — is the template from which a dozen other sauces follow.