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Sauce a la Tortue
3 cups brown consomme 1/2 can mushrooms 1/2 can tomatoes 1 truffle 1/4 cup sherry 1 bay leaf 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains red pepper Combine the consomme, the liquor from the mushrooms, tomatoes and seasonings. Cook these together and strain. Brown the butter, add the flour and brown together; add liquid mixture slowly, then the mushrooms and truffles cut fine. Cook together for five minutes. Add sherry and serve.
A brown sherry sauce built on a dark roux, thin by modern standards and meant to be ladled generously. The hinge is the roux: butter and flour must be browned to a genuine nut color before any liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and pale.
- Brown consomméA clear, well-reduced brown stock, not the canned clarified consommé sold today. A good unsalted beef stock, reduced until it has body and color, is the closest equivalent; adjust the half teaspoon of salt to suit.
- Can sizes"Half a can" of mushrooms and tomatoes is unhelpfully vague, and can sizes were not standard. Period canned mushrooms came in small tins and tomatoes in considerably larger ones, so read it as roughly 2 oz of mushrooms with their liquid and something like 8 oz of tomatoes. The mushroom liquor is deliberately kept and used; it carries much of the flavor.
- Browning the butter and flourTwo tablespoons each makes a light brown roux. Cook it over medium heat, stirring, until it smells toasted and turns the color of a hazelnut shell, five to eight minutes. Add the strained liquid slowly and off the direct heat to prevent lumps.
- StrainingThe tomatoes, bay leaf and mushroom liquor are simmered together and then strained out; only the mushrooms and truffle go back in. Do not skip the strain, or the tomato skins and seeds will coarsen the finish.
- TruffleOne truffle here most likely meant a small canned or preserved black truffle. A teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle or a few drops of truffle liquid from a jar gives the same intent; truffle oil is a different, harsher flavor and should be used sparingly if at all.
- Red pepperCayenne. A few grains means a pinch, enough to warm the back of the palate rather than register as heat.
- Sherry at the endThe wine goes in after the cooking is done so the aroma survives. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso, not cream sherry, and do not boil the sauce again once it is in.
- Yield and useAbout three cups, enough for eight servings. Filed here under fish, it suits poached or baked firm white fish, but the sauce is equally at home on braised veal or calf's head, which is what it was originally built for.
Sauce à la tortue means turtle sauce, and its name is generally traced to the garnish rather than any turtle in the pan. In classical French cookery a tortue garnish accompanied tête de veau, calf's head braised and dressed with mushrooms, truffles, olives and small quenelles in a madeira or sherry-spiked brown sauce, the whole meant to recall the rich, dark, wine-scented broth of real turtle soup. Green turtle was a luxury of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century table, and mock turtle preparations, built from calf's head or veal and heavily seasoned, were a common domestic answer to its expense. That a milling company's promotional cookbook carries a version says a good deal about American aspiration: the sauce has been reduced to canned mushrooms, canned tomatoes, a single truffle and a quarter cup of sherry, and reassigned from calf's head to fish, but the name and the browned roux that anchors it were kept intact.