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Spanish Sauce, Quickly Made
Peel an onion, split it in halves, stick a clove in each half, and put these into a saucepan with a bunch of parsley, a tea-spoonful of gelatine, half a dozen celery-seeds, and a pinch of dried tarragon, if it is at hand. Boil all gently together with a pint of water till the gelatine is dissolved, strain off the liquor, and stir into it a dessert-spoonful of Bovril; add as much salt as will be necessary to bring out the flavour. Thicken the gravy with a small piece of brown thickening. If this is not at hand, mix together small equal portions of flour and butter, stir the paste quickly over a brisk fire till it is brightly coloured, moisten with the stock, boil till smooth, and serve. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 4d.
A late-Victorian shortcut to espagnole, built on beef extract rather than a long-simmered brown stock. It comes together in half an hour, but the seasoning needs watching.
- Salt last, and sparinglyBovril is already a salty product. Add the extract, taste, and only then decide whether any salt is needed.
- Bovril and its stand-insStill sold, and still the closest thing to what the book means: a dark, salty beef extract paste. A concentrated beef stock pot or a good demi-glace concentrate does the same job; yeast extracts such as Marmite are savoury but taste nothing like beef.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, about 10 ml. The Victorian dessert spoon sat squarely between the tea-spoon and the table-spoon.
- The gelatineA teaspoon of powdered gelatine here is for body and gloss — the clinging quality a real brown stock would supply — not to set anything. Sprinkle it over cold water first so it swells rather than clumping.
- Brown thickeningA brown roux, cooked well past blond. Equal weights of butter and flour, stirred over heat until the colour of a hazelnut shell; "brisk fire" notwithstanding, moderate heat and patience give colour without scorching, and a burnt roux will make the whole sauce bitter.
- Six celery seedsNot a misprint. Celery seed is aggressive and slightly bitter in quantity; count them out rather than pinching.
- StrainingStrain the infusion before the roux goes in; once thickened it will not pass a sieve cleanly, and the clove-studded onion halves and parsley stalks have given what they have by then.
"Spanish sauce" is the English name for sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce codified in nineteenth-century French practice, which properly demands a roasted-bone stock reduced over the better part of a day, enriched with mirepoix and tomato. What Cassell's offers is that sauce reverse-engineered for a household without a stockpot: the meatiness comes out of a jar, the body out of a spoonful of gelatine, and the colour out of a well-browned roux. The jar in question was new-ish technology — Johnston's Fluid Beef, marketed as Bovril from the mid-1880s, was one of several concentrated beef preparations that put a semblance of stock within reach of cooks with a single stove and no time. The costing of fourpence is the point of the entry as much as the flavour is: this is a recipe about what a good sauce could be made to cost.