Home › Poultry and Game › Sauce
Sauce
1/4 cup butter 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion 1 slice carrot, cut in cubes 1 slice turnip, cut in cubes 1/4 cup flour 2 cups boiling water 1/2 cup stewed and strained tomato 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne Cook butter five minutes with vegetables. Add flour, with salt, pepper, and cayenne, and cook until flour is well browned. Add gradually water and tomato; cook five minutes, then strain.
A brown roux sauce built on water rather than stock, lightly flavoured with aromatics and tomato, then strained smooth. It belongs to the family of everyday brown sauces that once accompanied roast and braised poultry.
- Brown the roux properlyThe whole character of the sauce comes from cooking the flour until it is genuinely browned, the colour of a hazelnut shell. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; flour scorches quickly at this stage and a burnt roux is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- The vegetables are flavouring, not bodyThe recipe asks only for a slice each of carrot and turnip, cut in cubes, without specifying thickness. They are sweated in the butter for aroma and go out with the strainer, so uniform cutting matters little.
- Add liquid graduallyBoiling water into a hot brown roux will seize if dumped in at once. Pour in a little at a time, whisking to a smooth paste before each addition, then thin out with the rest and the tomato.
- Stewed and strained tomatoTomatoes (fresh or tinned) cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Half a cup of passata or plain tomato puree is the near equivalent; avoid tomato paste, which is far more concentrated.
- Five minutes is shortThe stated five minutes of simmering is enough to cook out raw flour taste but leaves the sauce thin in flavour, since it is made with water. Ten to fifteen minutes gives a better result, and substituting light chicken stock for the boiling water improves it more than anything else.
- StrainingPress through a fine sieve rather than pouring, so the softened vegetables give up their liquid. Season again after straining; salt reads differently once the sauce has reduced and been smoothed.
- YieldAbout two to two and a half cups; the recipe states no yield. It thickens on standing, so loosen with a spoonful of water.
This is a domesticated brown flour-thickened sauce of the kind that anchored the French repertoire and passed into American cookbooks through the cooking-school movement of the late nineteenth century. In a professional kitchen such a sauce would have been built on long-simmered brown stock and cooked for hours; here the stock is replaced by boiling water and the whole business reduced to a matter of minutes, on the assumption that a household cook has butter, flour and a few root vegetables but no stockpot going. The strained tomato does double duty, adding acidity and reinforcing the colour that the browned roux alone would only hint at.