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Spanish Sauce
4 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 2 tablespoons chopped onion Celery (1 tablespoon chopped fine) Carrot (1 tablespoon chopped fine) 1 bay leaf 6 peppers 1 clove 2 sprigs parsley 1 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups brown stock Cook vegetables with butter until brown, add the flour mixed with seasonings, combine the stock, one-third at a time, cook together five minutes and strain.
This is a small-batch brown sauce built on a mirepoix and a dark roux, meant to be spooned over baked or broiled fish. It comes together in about twenty minutes and depends almost entirely on how far you take the browning.
- "6 peppers"This means six whole black peppercorns, not chili peppers or ground pepper. They go in with the bay, clove and parsley and are strained out at the end.
- Gold Medal flourOrdinary all-purpose flour. The brand name is house advertising; nothing about the recipe depends on it.
- Brown stockA period brown stock is beef or veal bones roasted and simmered for hours, unsalted and unthickened. A good low-sodium beef broth stands in, but taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, since commercial broth is already seasoned.
- The hinge is the browning"Cook vegetables with butter until brown" is the whole character of the sauce. Take the onion, celery and carrot to a genuine deep gold over medium heat, then let the flour cook in that fat until it smells toasted. Rushing this leaves a pale, floury sauce that no amount of simmering will fix.
- Adding the stockA third at a time, whisked smooth before the next addition, is the classic method for a roux this thick and it still works.
- Five minutes is shortThe instruction to cook five minutes assumes a stock that already has body. If yours is thin, let it go ten to fifteen minutes before straining; the sauce should coat a spoon.
- StrainingPress the vegetables firmly against the sieve rather than just letting the sauce drip through.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter after straining, enough to sauce four to six portions of fish.
Despite the name, this has little to do with Spanish cooking. The sauce is essentially a small-batch sauce espagnole, the brown sauce of French cookery, whose own name is traditionally traced to the Spanish connections of the French court rather than to any dish from Spain -- an explanation that is tradition rather than documented fact. Classical espagnole is a long, multi-stage affair built on brown stock, roasted bones and often tomato; what appears here is the compressed domestic version found in turn-of-the-century household cookbooks, reduced to a roux, a handful of aromatics and a cup and a half of stock.