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Spanish Sauce
Brown 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, taking care that it does not burn. Add 1 tablespoonful each of lean chopped ham, onion, carrot, celery, and parsley. Cook all in the butter until brown. Stir in 2 tablespoonfuls of flour and cook until smooth. Add 2 cupfuls of good stock, half a bay leaf, a blade of mace, 2 cloves, salt, and a dash of cayenne, or half a saltspoonful of paprika. Simmer thirty minutes, strain, and serve very hot.
A brown sauce built on a mirepoix and a scrap of ham, thickened with a dark roux. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how patiently you brown the butter and flour.
- The hinge: brown, don't burnButter browns and then blackens fast because of its milk solids. Keep the heat at medium, stir constantly, and pull the pan off the burner the moment the flour smells like toasted nuts; a scorched roux turns the finished sauce bitter and no amount of straining will fix it.
- A saltspoonfulAn old measure equal to about a quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoonful of paprika is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon, so this is a whisper of warmth, not a Hungarian-style paprika sauce.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, and a "blade" is one dried piece. If you only have ground mace, use a scant quarter teaspoon; it is more assertive than the whole blade and will dominate if you go further.
- Good stockHere this means a homemade brown veal or beef stock, usually lightly seasoned and gelatinous. Commercial broth is thinner and already salted, so hold back the salt until after straining and reduce a little longer if the sauce seems watery.
- Lean chopped hamCountry ham or prosciutto end works better than sandwich ham, which is wet-cured and will steam rather than brown. A tablespoon is about half an ounce, finely diced.
- Vegetable prepCut the carrot, onion and celery small and even, around an eighth of an inch, so they colour in the same few minutes as the ham. Add the parsley near the end of the browning, since the stems burn quickly.
- Straining and holdingPress the solids in the sieve to extract the liquid, then keep the sauce over hot, not boiling, water. It will form a skin if left uncovered; a dot of butter on the surface prevents it.
- YieldTwo cups of stock reduced for thirty minutes gives roughly a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings.
Nineteenth-century cookbooks used "Spanish sauce" loosely for a brown sauce sharpened with something warm or pungent, and the name is generally traced to the classical French sauce espagnole, the dark mother sauce of brown stock, roux and aromatics. The Spanish connection in that older name is usually attributed to the ham and to peppers, though the story is traditional rather than documented. What is on the page here is a small household version of the professional method: instead of the long stock reduction a restaurant kitchen would use, a home cook browns a spoonful each of ham and vegetables, builds a roux in the same pan, and simmers for half an hour.