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Espagnole Sauce
Heat 2 cups veal stock into which have been put 1/2 bay leaf, a blade of mace, and a couple of cloves. Cook together 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and 3 of flour; then stir in heated stock. Mince 1 tablespoonful each of ham, onion, celery, carrot, parsley; season with 1/4 teaspoonful salt, and 1/2 teaspoonful paprika; then add to the stock and simmer gently for one hour; strain, and serve very hot.
A compact, small-batch version of one of the classic mother sauces, scaled for a household rather than a restaurant brigade. It comes together in about ninety minutes, most of that unattended simmering.
- The hinge: cook the roux to colourAn espagnole is defined by its brown roux. Cook the butter and flour over medium-low heat, stirring, for 8-12 minutes until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut butter. Stopping at pale blond gives you a velouté with vegetables in it.
- Add hot stock to hot roux, off the heatPull the pan aside and whisk the heated stock in a ladle at a time. Dumping it all at once into a browned roux is the usual cause of lumps, and browned roux has less thickening power to begin with.
- Veal stockUnsalted veal or brown chicken stock both work; the recipe specifies only "veal stock." Avoid salted commercial broth, since the sauce concentrates over the hour's simmer.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold today mostly ground. A blade is usually reckoned at roughly a quarter to a half teaspoonful of the ground spice, and it goes in with the bay and cloves rather than at the end.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon in two cups of sauce is assertive by modern standards for a brown sauce. Use sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked or hot, unless you want it to dominate.
- The minceA tablespoon each of ham, onion, celery, carrot and parsley is a mirepoix in miniature. Cut everything fine so it gives up its flavour in the hour allotted; the solids are discarded at the strainer.
- Skim as it simmersKeep the pot at a bare bubble and set it slightly off-centre on the burner so the fat and scum collect on one side, where a spoon can lift them off. Skimming is what separates a clear, glossy espagnole from a cloudy one.
- Yield and useExpect a generous cup to a cup and a half of finished sauce. It is a base as much as a sauce: reduce it with red wine for a bordelaise, or reduce it with more brown stock toward a demi-glace.
Espagnole is one of the four sauces Antonin Carême set at the head of French sauce-making in the early nineteenth century, and which Escoffier later reorganised into the familiar group of mother sauces. The name means simply "Spanish," and the usual explanation — traditional rather than documented — is that Spanish cooks in the French court insisted on the dark, well-browned stock base, or alternatively that Spanish tomatoes and ham gave the sauce its character; the ham in this version is a nod to that story. American compilations of the early 1900s reprinted the classic sauces in shortened household form like this one, trading the several days and gallons of stock a professional kitchen would spend for two cups and an hour on the back of the stove.