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Spanish Sauce
2 tablespoons finely chopped lean raw ham 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 2 tablespoons chopped celery 1 1/3 cups Brown Stock 2 tablespoons chopped carrot 2/3 cup stewed and strained tomatoes 1 tablespoon chopped onion Salt and pepper Cook ham and vegetables with butter until butter is well browned; add flour, stock, and tomatoes; cook five minutes, then strain. Season with salt and pepper.
A brown sauce built on a small mirepoix and raw ham, thickened with a browned roux and finished with tomato. It makes roughly a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings alongside grilled meat, croquettes or fried fish.
- The hinge: brown the butter properlyThe instruction to cook until "butter is well browned" is the whole character of the sauce. Keep the pan at a steady medium heat and let the ham and vegetables take real colour, six to ten minutes, without letting the milk solids in the butter go black and bitter.
- Raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham, not the sliced boiled ham of a sandwich. Prosciutto, speck or a piece of unsmoked country ham all work; two tablespoons finely diced is about 20 g.
- Brown StockThe book's own preparation is a beef stock, with some of the meat and bone browned first and then simmered for hours. A good unsalted beef stock or a strong veal demi-glace loosened with water will stand in. Avoid heavily salted cubes, since the ham already brings salt.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesCooked-down tomato pulp pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seed. Passata is the closest modern equivalent; canned crushed tomatoes work if you sieve them. Two-thirds cup is about 160 ml.
- Five minutes is short for a roux sauceThe flour is already partly cooked in the browned butter, but five minutes of simmering leaves a faint raw-flour edge. Ten to fifteen minutes gives a cleaner taste and a better gloss; add a spoonful of stock if it tightens too much.
- StrainingThe vegetables and ham are flavouring only and are discarded. Press them firmly against the sieve to get everything out, then taste before seasoning, as the ham may have salted it sufficiently.
- Holding and reheatingA film forms as it cools. Lay buttered paper or plastic directly on the surface, or float a little melted butter on top, and whisk over gentle heat to bring it back.
"Spanish sauce" in American and British cookbooks of this period is often associated with the French sauce espagnole, the brown sauce codified in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, though the link is not certain and the tomato here sets this version apart. Explanations of the name that invoke a Spanish taste in cooking are traditional rather than documented. The version here is a domestic shortcut: a full espagnole calls for a slowly browned roux and hours of simmering with bones, while this one gets its depth in minutes from browned butter, cured ham and ready-made brown stock. The addition of tomato and its brief cooking mark it as a household sauce.