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Madeira Sauce, with Chestnuts
Take two table-spoonfuls of chestnut flour, i.e. chestnuts that have been rubbed through a sieve, add one ounce of butter, half a tea-spoonful of salt, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, and enough good brown stock to reduce it to the consistency of ordinary brown sauce, flavour with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of nutmeg, and a glass of cooking sherry or Madeira. Pour this sauce round the vegetable.
A brown sauce thickened with sieved chestnut rather than roux, meant to be poured around a vegetable dish rather than over it. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the chestnuts are cooked.
- "Chestnut flour" here is not flourThe recipe defines its own term: cooked chestnuts pushed through a sieve, i.e. a smooth chestnut purée. Dried milled chestnut flour from an Italian grocer is a different, sweeter product and will not behave the same way. Two tablespoons of purée is only a small handful of peeled cooked chestnuts (about 30 g); unsweetened tinned or vacuum-packed chestnuts sieved or blitzed work perfectly.
- A glass of wineA wineglassful in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though period sources vary between roughly 2 and 2½ fl oz. Add it early enough to simmer off the raw alcohol — two or three minutes of gentle reduction.
- Cooking sherryBottles sold as "cooking sherry" are in some markets salted to make them undrinkable, which will throw the seasoning out. Use a dry amontillado or a Sercial or Verdelho Madeira, and hold back on the half teaspoon of salt until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- Good brown stockThe book assumes a proper reduced veal or beef stock with body of its own. A tub of unsalted beef or veal stock reduced by half gives something close; a thin stock cube will leave the sauce hollow, since the chestnut supplies thickness but no depth.
- Consistency"Ordinary brown sauce" means it coats the back of a spoon and just runs off; add the stock gradually until it does. Chestnut purée thickens as it cools, so leave it a shade looser than you want it on the plate.
- StrainingSieved chestnut can still leave a slight graininess. Pass the finished sauce through a fine sieve or give it thirty seconds with a stick blender before adding the lemon.
- Lemon and nutmeg lastBoth are volatile. Add the squeeze of lemon and the grating of nutmeg off the heat, at the point of serving, or the sauce tastes flat.
- Yield and useA small quantity, enough to pour around a dish of braised celery, salsify, cardoons or Brussels sprouts, which is the kind of "vegetable" the instruction seems to have in mind. It also suits roast game and cold tongue.
Sauce madère — a rich brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira — was a fixture of nineteenth-century restaurant and household cookery in Britain. Madeira itself owed its ubiquity in British kitchens to a long-standing trade: the fortified wine survived sea voyages and cellar neglect better than most, so an opened bottle could sit in the larder for months, which is exactly what a sauce made by the glassful requires. The chestnut is the local variation here. Sieved chestnut as a thickener and flavouring belongs to a broader European tradition of using the nut as a starch, and it gives the sauce a faint sweetness and a velvety body that a flour-based roux does not. Serving the sauce poured around rather than over the vegetable may reflect the plating conventions of the period, in which a dressed vegetable was arguably meant to be seen, though that is inference rather than anything the book states.