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Sauce Piquante
1 cup Spanish Sauce 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon onion 1 tablespoon carrot minced fine 1/2 cup vinegar 1 bay leaf 1 clove Gherkins (2 tablespoons chopped fine) Capers (2 tablespoons chopped fine) Olives (2 tablespoons chopped fine) Parsley (2 tablespoons chopped fine) 6 peppercorns 6 allspice berries 1/2 blade mace Cook the vegetables in the butter, add the vinegar, spices, seasonings and Spanish Sauce; simmer twenty minutes. Before serving add the gherkins, capers, olives and parsley.
A classic reduction sauce built on a cup of made-ahead brown sauce; the work is in the vinegar reduction and the restraint at the end. Read the whole thing before starting, since the finishing garnish is never cooked.
- Spanish Sauce firstThis recipe is a derivative and cannot be made without its base. Spanish (espagnole) sauce is conventionally a brown roux moistened with stock and flavored with tomato, mirepoix and herbs, cooked down and strained; check the book's own version. A cup of good demi-glace or a well-reduced brown stock sauce stands in acceptably; canned brown gravy does not.
- The hinge: the pickles go in off the heatThe hinge: the pickles go in last -- Gherkins, capers, olives and parsley are added at the last moment; the recipe says "before serving," not off the heat, but the effect is the same. Simmered, they turn drab and the sharpness flattens into general sourness. Stir them in at the very end and serve within a few minutes.
- Whole spices, and strainWhole spices -- Bay, clove, peppercorns, allspice and mace go in whole. Nothing in the text says to strain, though a diner biting a clove is presumably not the intended effect, so sieving after the twenty minutes is a reasonable modern choice rather than a stated instruction. A blade of mace is a piece of the whole spice, not ground mace, which is far more assertive.
- The vinegarHalf a cup to one cup of sauce is a lot, and the twenty-minute simmer is what tames it; note that the recipe adds the vinegar along with the Spanish Sauce rather than reducing it first. Use a plain white wine or cider vinegar, not distilled white, and let it cook down until the raw edge is gone before judging the seasoning. Modern table vinegar is typically around 5 percent acidity.
- Onion and carrotA tablespoon each, minced very fine, is a token mirepoix meant to melt away. Cook them gently in the butter until soft, without browning, before the vinegar goes in.
- Salt and the olivesCapers, olives and a reduced brown sauce all carry salt. Season only at the end, after the garnish is in.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four to six portions. It suits fried or broiled firm white fish, though classically the same sauce is standard with grilled pork and with boiled beef.
Sauce piquante belongs to the classical French system of small sauces, in which a large batch of mother sauce is made once and then pulled in a dozen directions by acid, aromatics and garnish. Escoffier's codification gives a broadly similar structure: a vinegar and shallot reduction, espagnole, and chopped gherkins and herbs added at the finish. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook is a small sign of how thoroughly French restaurant technique had filtered into American middle-class domestic cooking by the early twentieth century, though the reliance on a made-ahead brown sauce also assumes a household kitchen that keeps stock on hand. The Louisiana dish called sauce piquante, tomato-based and built on a dark roux, is a separate tradition sharing only the name and the idea of sharpness.