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Provencale Sauce
Put a spoonful of salad-oil into a stewpan with a clove of garlic, a table-spoonful of chopped shallots, and three table-spoonfuls of chopped raw mushrooms. Stir these ingredients over the fire for five minutes, then add a bay-leaf, a sprig of thyme, a glassful of sherry, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and half a blade of mace. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour. Take out the herbs and garlic, and add two table-spoonfuls more stock, and a little salt if required. Simmer five minutes, carefully skim the sauce, rub it through a fine hair sieve, heat it again, and serve very hot. A table-spoonful of lemon-juice should be added at the last moment, or, if preferred, three or four ripe tomatoes may be boiled in the sauce until they are soft enough to pass through the sieve. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A short, sharp reduction sauce that depends on the mushrooms and shallots browning properly before the wine goes in. A few of the measurements are of their period, and one instruction refers to an ingredient the recipe never actually lists.
- The missing stockThe instruction to "add two table-spoonfuls more stock" implies stock was already in the pan, but none is listed. Read it as an omission: the sauce needs roughly a cup of good brown stock added with or just after the sherry, or it will reduce to a spoonful of scorched aromatics.
- Salad-oilIn Victorian cookery salad-oil generally meant olive oil. A spoonful is not much for three tablespoons of mushrooms; a tablespoon and a half is a fairer starting point.
- A glassful of sherryThe recipe does not specify the glass; if it is the usual wineglass of Victorian cookery books, that is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Use a dry fino or amontillado rather than a cream sherry.
- Half a blade of maceMace blades are the lacy aril of nutmeg, still sold whole in spice shops. Half a blade is a fragment about the size of a thumbnail; a pinch of ground mace substitutes, but add it at the end since ground spice will not be strained out.
- Whole aromatics, then outWhole aromatics -- the peppercorns, mace, bay and thyme are there to infuse, not to be eaten. The recipe lifts out the herbs and garlic after the quarter-hour simmer; the peppercorns and mace are caught later by the sieve.
- The sieveA fine hair sieve is a fine-mesh strainer. Push the solids through with the back of a ladle rather than straining and discarding, or you lose most of the mushroom body that gives the sauce its texture.
- Tomatoes or lemonThe two finishes are alternatives, not additions. Lemon juice goes in off the heat at the last second so it stays bright; the tomatoes must be boiled until they collapse, which will take the dish past the stated half hour.
- YieldThe recipe claims four to five servings as a sauce, though it does not say what it is to be served with.
Sauces called provençale in nineteenth-century English kitchens seem to have been defined less by tomato than by garlic and olive oil, the two things the north of France and England alike regarded as characteristically southern. This recipe treats the tomato as optional, which arguably places it at a transitional moment: tomatoes were, by most accounts, widely available in Britain by the 1870s and 1880s but still often handled as a flavouring or a colouring rather than as the base of a sauce. The structure underneath is entirely classical French aromatics sweated in fat, deglazed with fortified wine, infused with a bouquet, reduced, then passed through a sieve and the regional label sits on top of it like a hat. The garlic clove is pulled out before serving rather than crushed into the sauce, though what that says about how the ingredient was regarded at an English table is a matter of interpretation.