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Madeira Sauce (To cupful of brown sauce add)
To 1 cupful of brown sauce add 1 tablespoonful each of minced ham and celery; season with 1/4 teaspoonful each of kitchen bouquet and paprika. Simmer for half an hour, then add 1/4 cupful madeira wine.
A short compound sauce built on an existing brown sauce, of the sort a period kitchen kept simmering all day. The whole point is the order of operations: the wine goes in last and barely cooks.
- Add the Madeira off the heatAdd the Madeira at the end -- the recipe puts it in last and says nothing about cooking it further. Keeping the sauce below a simmer once the wine is in preserves its aromatics, which hard boiling would drive off.
- Brown sauceThis means espagnole or a plain flour-and-brown-stock sauce, not gravy from a jar. A well-reduced veal or beef stock thickened with a brown roux, about the consistency of heavy cream, is what the recipe assumes.
- Kitchen BouquetStill sold: a caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid used for colour and a little savoury depth. A quarter teaspoon in a cup of sauce is for colour alone; if your brown sauce is already dark, leave it out.
- Which MadeiraUse a dry style such as Sercial or Verdelho. The sweet Bual and Malmsey types will read as dessert wine against ham and celery. Cooking Madeira is heavily salted and worth avoiding here, since the ham brings its own salt.
- The half-hour simmerA cup of sauce will reduce noticeably in thirty minutes over anything but the lowest heat. Cover it, or expect to loosen the finished sauce with a spoonful or two of stock.
- Strain or notThe minced ham and celery can be passed out through a fine sieve after the simmer for a smoother sauce, or left in for a textured one. The recipe does not say which was intended.
- YieldAbout a cup after reduction, enough to sauce four portions. It suits beef fillet, tongue and veal.
Madeira sauce is one of the small brown derivatives codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking, where a large batch of espagnole was split off through the service into named sauces by the addition of a wine, a garnish or a seasoning. Madeira earned its place partly for taste and partly for keeping qualities: the wine is deliberately heated and oxidised during production, so an opened bottle survives far longer than table wine, which is one reason it appears so often in old recipes. Kitchen Bouquet is an American commercial browning of nineteenth-century origin, and its presence here suggests an English-language household adaptation rather than a restaurant formula, written for a cook whose brown sauce might not be dark enough on its own.