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Sauce Champagne
1 cup brown stock 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1 cup champagne Cook butter and flour together, stir in slowly the brown stock, cook five minutes; remove from the fire and stir in the champagne.
A simple blond-to-brown roux sauce finished with wine off the heat. The proportions are unusual — equal parts stock and champagne — and that is deliberate: the wine is meant to stay bright.
- The hinge: add the wine off the fireOnce the champagne goes in, the sauce should not return to a boil. Heating it drives off the aroma the sauce exists for and flattens the acidity into something dull. Warm the serving dish instead and pour the sauce over at the last moment.
- Brown stockVeal or beef bones roasted dark, then simmered — what a modern cook would call a brown veal or beef stock. A good low-sodium beef stock, reduced by a third to concentrate it, is the practical substitute. The recipe specifies no salt at all, so seasoning is left to the cook.
- Cook the roux properlyEqual volumes of butter and flour (the butter is the heavier of the two by weight), cooked until it loses the raw-paste taste; the recipe gives no time for this stage. The five minutes specified after the stock goes in is for the flour to cook out and thicken.
- The champagneUse a dry sparkling wine — brut, not demi-sec, which will make the sauce cloying against fish. The bubbles are irrelevant by the time it is in the pan, so an opened bottle from the day before is perfectly serviceable. There is no substitute that behaves the same way; a dry white wine gives a decent but different sauce.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of total liquid is a thin sauce by design, closer to a pouring nappe than a coating. If you want it heavier, reduce the stock further before the roux rather than adding more flour.
- AlcoholBecause the wine is added off the heat and never cooked, most of the alcohol remains in the sauce. Worth knowing before serving it to anyone avoiding it.
- Yield and useAbout two cups. The recipe does not say what it is meant to accompany; a sauce of this kind would suit poached or baked fish or plain roast meat. Best made shortly before serving, as it does not hold or reheat well.
Wine-finished sauces of this kind belong to the classical French repertoire that American cookbooks were absorbing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a roux, a good stock, and a finishing liquid stirred in at the end. The reference to Gold Medal flour by name marks this as a milling company's promotional cookbook, and the presence of a dish called "Sauce Champagne" in one suggests something about the aspirations of the middle-class American table of the period. The odd detail is the brown stock — classical champagne sauces are more usually built on a fish base — which gives this version a darker, meatier foundation than the name suggests.