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BORDELAISE SAUCE (a la Gouffe)
Add to half a pint of Sauterne a table-spoonful of shallots, blanched and chopped, and a very small quantity of mignonette pepper. Reduce it, by boiling, to a quarter of a pint, then add a pint of Spanish sauce, and boil for five minutes, with the addition of a table-spoonful of chopped parsley.
A short reduction sauce that depends entirely on a good espagnole; the wine work takes ten minutes, the base takes hours or comes from a jar.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of Sauternes is about 1¼ US cups (300 ml), reduced to roughly 150 ml. The pint of Spanish sauce is about 2½ US cups.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of veal or beef stock thickened with brown roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato. Nothing Spanish about it beyond the name; a good reduced brown stock lightly bound will stand in, but a thin gravy will not.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked peppercorns, traditionally white, crushed rather than ground so they infuse without clouding the sauce. Crack them under a pan base; a fine grind will make the sauce gritty and harsh.
- SauternesA Bordeaux white, in the nineteenth century usually sweet, though English books of the period sometimes used "Sauterne" loosely for white Bordeaux generally. This is a white-wine bordelaise rather than the red-wine version better known today. A sweet or off-dry white suits it; a bone-dry wine gives a sharper sauce.
- Blanching the shallotsA brief plunge in boiling water, then drained, takes the raw bite off before they go into the wine.
- The hingeReduce the wine hard before the espagnole goes in. If you add the brown sauce early and try to reduce everything together, the sauce thickens and catches long before the wine has concentrated.
- ParsleyAdded with the five-minute boil rather than at the start, so it is barely cooked.
- YieldSomething over 2½ cups after the five-minute boil, enough for six to eight portions of grilled or roast beef, steaks, or tournedos. Strain if you want it smooth, or leave the shallots in for texture.
Jules Gouffé (1807–1877), a pupil of Carême and later chef of the Paris Jockey Club, wrote Le Livre de Cuisine in 1867; his brother Alphonse, pastry chef to Queen Victoria, translated it for English readers, and "a la Gouffé" appears as a tag in Victorian British cookery books. Bordelaise sauces take their name from Bordeaux and its wine, and nineteenth-century French practice recognised both a red-wine version, usually finished with poached beef marrow, and white-wine versions like this one. The narrowing of "bordelaise" in modern usage to mean red wine and marrow alone is later.