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Truffle Sauce
Clean and peel four truffles, and cut them into squares of a quarter of an inch each way. Put them into a stewpan with half a pint of good brown sauce, and stir over a gentle fire for ten minutes. Add a glassful of sherry, and, if liked, a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, and serve. Time, ten minutes to boil the sauce. Probable cost, fresh truffles, from 6s. to 18s. a pound; bottled truffles, 1s. 10d. for a small bottle. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A short compound sauce that stands or falls on the brown sauce underneath it. The truffle is a flavouring here, not a texture, so the base needs to be good before the truffles go anywhere near it.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerThe hinge: keep the heat low -- Truffle aroma is volatile and suffers from hard boiling and prolonged heat. "Stir over a gentle fire" points to a bare simmer, though the book's own time line calls the ten minutes "to boil the sauce".
- "Good brown sauce"In Cassell's this is a browned-roux sauce built on stock, the book's own brown sauce rather than necessarily a full espagnole. A demi-glace, or a well-reduced veal stock lightly thickened, will stand in.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is a generous quantity for four or five as a sauce for meat or game.
- A glassful of sherryA Victorian wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso rather than a cream sherry, and add it at the end as directed so it does not cook down to nothing.
- Peeling trufflesNineteenth-century truffles arrived caked in soil and were routinely pared. Modern black truffles are brushed clean and used skin and all; the peel carries a good deal of the flavour, so scrub rather than peel unless the skin is damaged.
- Four trufflesNo weight is given, and truffle size varies enormously; four truffles diced at a quarter of an inch implies considerably more truffle than a modern cook would put into half a pint of sauce, so judge by taste. The bottled truffles the book prices are milder than fresh and need a heavier hand.
- VesselA "stewpan" is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any small heavy saucepan will do; a wide pan encourages evaporation you do not want.
- ServingThe recipe says only "serve"; a sauce of this kind suits roast or braised beef, veal, game birds, or poached eggs. Spoon it over at the table rather than holding it hot on the stove, which drives off the aroma.
Truffle sauce belongs to the classical French repertoire of small brown sauces that English kitchens adopted wholesale in the nineteenth century — a mother sauce (espagnole) plus a garnish and a fortified wine, which is broadly how the system is generally traced to Carême and his successors. The prices Cassell's quotes are the interesting part: 6s. to 18s. a pound for fresh truffles at a time when a labourer's weekly wage was commonly in the range of 10s. to 14s., against 1s. 10d. for a small bottle. Bottled and tinned truffles, generally French, were what put such a sauce within reach of the middle-class household this dictionary was written for. The truffles in question were most likely Périgord black truffles from south-west France, harvested in winter with pigs or dogs; the English truffle of the beech woods supported a real if small trade.