Home › Meat and Fish Sauces › Brown Sauce
Brown Sauce
Heat one cup of stock; blend together one tablespoon each of butter and flour, add to the hot stock with two cloves, one bay leaf, one teaspoon each of chopped onion and parsley. Cook for a few minutes. Strain and serve hot with cannelon of beef or rolled beef. - Stella A. Downing.
A small, plain espagnole-style sauce built on one cup of stock — enough for four modest servings. The instructions are compressed even by 1900s standards, so a few things are worth spelling out.
- Brown the roux, not just the sauceBrown the roux, or use a well-coloured stock -- The recipe says only to blend butter and flour. Much of the colour in a sauce like this would have come from a brown stock; if your stock is pale, cooking the butter-and-flour paste in the pan until it takes on a nutty colour before the stock goes in will help both colour and flavour.
- "Blend together" means beurre manié or a rouxEqual parts butter and flour worked to a paste can be whisked into hot liquid in small pieces, which is what the wording implies. Cooked in the pan first is better here; either way, add the stock gradually and whisk to avoid lumps.
- "Cook for a few minutes" is too short"Cook for a few minutes" is brief -- A longer simmer, ten minutes or so at a bare simmer, gives the flour more time to lose its raw taste and lets the clove and bay steep further, though the recipe as written does not ask for it. Skim any skin that forms at the edge.
- StockThe recipe specifies only "stock." Given the pairing with beef, an unsalted beef stock is the safest reading; salt at the end, since the sauce reduces.
- Two cloves is the ceilingTwo cloves goes a long way -- Whole cloves in a single cup of liquid dominate quickly, so resist increasing them by eye.
- Strain, and mean itEverything aromatic here is meant to be removed: cloves, bay, onion, parsley. Pour through a fine sieve and press lightly, then reheat without boiling if the butter has separated.
- Cannelon of beefThe dish it is meant for is chopped or minced beef rolled into a log, bound with egg and crumbs, and baked or braised — a period meatloaf in cylinder form. The sauce works equally with any braised or roast beef.
- YieldSlightly under a cup after straining and reduction, which is roughly three to four tablespoons per plate for four.
Brown sauce is the domesticated American descendant of the French sauce espagnole, one of the foundational sauces codified by Carême, which in a professional kitchen meant brown roux, brown stock and a long, repeatedly skimmed simmer with aromatic vegetables. What appears here is that idea reduced to what a household cook could manage between other tasks: one cup of stock, a spoonful of roux, and four aromatics steeped for a few minutes. American cookbooks of the period often performed this sort of compression. The recipe carries a contributor's name, Stella A. Downing, which suggests a compilation drawing on submitted recipes. The pairing with cannelon of beef places it in the era's economical meat cookery, where a shaped roll of chopped beef was dressed up with a sauce to make it presentable at table.