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Madeira Sauce
Mix one gill of Madeira with three gills of brown sauce; add a few drops of cayenne vinegar, a pinch of salt and sugar, and a table-spoonful or two of clear brown stock or gravy. Boil up and skim, and serve hot. Half an ounce of glaze improves the sauce. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A short reduction sauce that depends entirely on the quality of the brown sauce underneath it. The proportions are simple; the work is in what you start with.
- GillsA gill is a quarter-pint; in imperial measure that is 5 fl oz (the American gill is smaller, 4 fl oz or half a cup). So this is roughly 5 fl oz Madeira to 15 fl oz brown sauce, making something over a pint of finished sauce to serve alongside beef, veal or game.
- Brown sauceMost likely the book's basic brown sauce in the espagnole manner: a brown roux moistened with brown stock, cooked down slowly and strained. A modern demi-glace, or a good reduced beef stock thickened lightly, stands in for it. Jarred gravy will taste of jarred gravy.
- GlazeGlaze is meat stock reduced until it sets to a firm jelly — the ancestor of the little tubs of concentrated stock sold today. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon; it is there for depth and gloss, not thickness.
- Cayenne vinegarVinegar steeped with cayenne pods, once a standard sideboard bottle. A few drops of hot sauce plus a splash of wine vinegar gives the same effect: heat with acidity, not heat alone.
- MadeiraUse a dry or medium Madeira such as Sercial or Verdelho. The sweeter Bual and Malmsey styles will push the sauce toward dessert territory, especially with the added pinch of sugar.
- Boil up and skimThe boil is brief — just enough to cook off the raw spirit and bring the fat and scum to the surface for skimming. Long boiling drives off the wine aroma the sauce is named for, so add the Madeira near the end if you are also reducing.
- SeasoningThe pinch of sugar most likely works as a corrective to the wine's acidity rather than as a sweetener. If you prefer, hold it back and add it after tasting, only if the sauce tastes sharp.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. was a real sum in the later nineteenth century — a reminder that this was a sauce for a dinner party, not a weeknight, with the wine the likeliest source of the expense.
Madeira sauce is one of the small compound sauces built on espagnole in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, and it demonstrates the system: make one good brown sauce, then branch it with a wine, a garnish or an acid. Madeira itself was enormously popular in Britain from the eighteenth century onward, partly because the wine was fortified and heated in transit and so survived long sea voyages better than most — the shipping conditions that would ruin other wines improved this one. The sauce was a standard accompaniment to braised beef, ham, tongue and made dishes of game. The instruction that half an ounce of glaze "improves the sauce" is a glimpse of the Victorian professional kitchen, where a pot of reduced stock jelly stood ready to give body and shine to whatever needed it.