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SPANISH SAUCE (M. Ude's way)
Besides some slices of ham, put into a stewpan some slices of veal. Moisten the same as for cullis (see CULLIS, OR RICH GRAVY); simmer them in the like manner; let all the glaze go to the bottom, and when of a nice red colour moisten with a few spoonfuls of stock-broth liquor to detach the glaze; then add a pint and a half of stock. Let the whole boil for half an hour to remove all the fat. Strain it through a clean tamis. Remember always to put some mushrooms, with a bunch of parsley and green onions, into these sauces. It is necessary to observe to the professors of cookery that the flavour proceeds from the seasoning, and if the necessary articles are neglected to be put to a nicety into the sauces, the flavour will be deficient. Mind that the sauce or broth when kept too long on the fire loses the proper taste, and acquires instead a strong and disagreeable one.
A brown sauce built the pre-roux way: meat browned to a glaze in the pan, the glaze dissolved with stock, then skimmed and strained. Ude assumes you have already read his cullis instructions, which is where the thickening lives.
- The hinge is the glazeEverything depends on cooking the ham and veal down until the juices form a sticky, deep red-brown film on the pan bottom, then deglazing before it turns black. Take it too far and the sauce is bitter; stop too early and it is pale and thin.
- Cullis"Cullis" is the English form of the French coulis, a rich brown gravy long-simmered from meat and usually thickened. Ude is telling you to start this sauce exactly as you start that one, with the same moistening and slow simmer, so read that entry first.
- MeasuresThe pint and a half is an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so roughly 30 fl oz or 850 ml of stock. "A few spoonfuls" for deglazing is a splash -- enough to lift the glaze and no more.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of fine woven cloth stretched on a hoop. A fine chinois, or a conical strainer lined with damp muslin, does the same job; press the solids gently rather than forcing them, or the sauce clouds.
- Green onionsThese are spring onions or scallions, tied with the parsley as an aromatic bunch rather than chopped into the sauce; the mushrooms the recipe names separately. All of it comes out with the straining.
- Half an hour to remove the fatThe boil is a skimming operation, not a reduction: fat and scum rise and are lifted off. Chilling the strained sauce and lifting the set cap of fat is more thorough.
- Don't hold it on the heatHis closing note is sound. Held at a simmer for hours, a stock-based sauce goes flat and takes on a stale, over-cooked edge. Cool it quickly and reheat what you need.
- YieldThe recipe gives no finished quantity; expect somewhat less than the pint and a half of stock you started with after skimming and straining. It is a base for entrées and for smaller derivative sauces rather than a sauce to serve as it stands.
"Spanish sauce" is simply the English rendering of sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of French cookery, and Cassell's here reprints the method of Louis Eustache Ude, the French chef who cooked for the Earl of Sefton and later ran the kitchens at Crockford's club in London, and whose The French Cook (1813) went through many English editions. Why the sauce is called Spanish is unsettled: the usual story, traditional rather than documented, credits Spanish cooks in the household of a French-Spanish royal marriage, and it is best treated as a name of unknown origin. What matters in Ude's version is that it predates the tidy classifications of Escoffier: the whole thing is a working stock-pot procedure for a professional kitchen. His closing lecture to "the professors of cookery" about seasoning and over-boiling is characteristic of the man, who wrote as an instructor of other cooks rather than of housewives.