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Spanish Sauce, Highly Flavoured
Dissolve a thick slice of fresh butter in a saucepan, and throw into it a quarter of a pound of lean ham cut into dice, four sliced shallots, a dozen mushrooms cleaned and cut small, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, a dozen peppercorns, half a blade of mace, and three cloves. Stir these ingredients over a gentle fire till a red tinge appears round the inside of the saucepan. Add gradually a pint of clear stock, and simmer the sauce gently for three-quarters of an hour. Carefully remove the scum as it rises. Strain the sauce, add cayenne and salt if necessary, and thicken with a little brown thickening. Let it simmer again, that it may throw up the fat, and carefully remove this till no more appears. A few minutes before the sauce is to be served stir into it a wine-glassful of sherry or Madeira. Time, altogether, about an hour and a quarter. Probable cost, 2s. per pint.
A compact Espagnole in the Victorian manner: a ham-and-aromatic base sweated to the point of caramelisation, moistened with stock, skimmed hard, and finished with fortified wine. The whole thing lives or dies on the browning stage.
- The hinge: "a red tinge round the inside of the saucepan"That is the fond — the sticky brown film of caramelised ham and shallot sugars on the pan wall. Keep the heat gentle and stir until it colours a deep russet, but stop before it goes black, since burnt fond will make the whole pint bitter and cannot be strained out.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in butter until nut-brown, kept in a jar and whisked in as needed. Roughly equal weights butter and flour, cooked slowly to the colour of an old penny; about 1 oz of each will thicken a pint to coating consistency. Browned flour thickens less than pale roux, so allow a little more.
- A blade of maceThe lacy aril of nutmeg, sold whole in blades. Half a blade is a fragment about the size of a thumbnail. If only ground mace is at hand, a scant pinch is the equivalent, though it will cloud the sauce and cannot be strained out.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is about 2 fl oz (a quarter cup), not a modern wine pour. Add it off the boil at the end so the wine keeps its aroma; long simmering will cook the character out of dry sherry or Madeira.
- Lean hamA quarter pound of lean cured ham. Heavily smoked supermarket ham will dominate the sauce, and the salt content varies enough that the final seasoning should be checked only at the very end.
- DegreasingThe instruction to let it simmer so it "throws up the fat" is deliberate: a sauce held just below a boil at one side of the pan pushes fat and scum to the cool edge, where it can be lifted off. Chilling the strained sauce and lifting the set fat achieves the same thing with less attention.
- StockThe recipe asks only for 'clear stock'; for a brown sauce of this kind that would most likely be a brown beef or veal stock, strained clear. Commercial cubes and concentrates are far saltier than a home-clarified stock, so if using them, omit added salt entirely until tasting at the end.
- Yield and useThe pint will reduce somewhat with the long simmering, skimming and straining: enough for several servings poured over roast or braised meat, game, or grilled kidneys. It keeps several days refrigerated and freezes well in small portions.
- Cost"2s. per pint" is two shillings in pre-decimal money — a fair sum in the 1870s–80s, reflecting the ham, the mushrooms and the glass of sherry rather than any difficulty in the method.
Despite the name, this is a British reading of the French sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce that Carême codified early in the nineteenth century and that Escoffier later pared back. Why a brown sauce built on ham and stock should be called Spanish is not settled; the usual explanation, traditional rather than documented, is that Spanish cooks in the French royal kitchens brought the taste for a dark, ham-scented base, and the Spanish sherry and Madeira in the finish certainly did nothing to discourage the label. A household that could keep a pot of good brown sauce and a jar of brown thickening on hand could produce a dozen other sauces from them -- the Victorian kitchen worked outward from a small number of foundations, and this is one of them.