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Demi-Glace Sauce (This sauce is made)
This sauce is made from the gravy of roast veal, which is reduced to the desired consistency with a ladleful of Espagnole sauce and a small glass of sherry. Pass the sauce through a tammy-cloth and use as directed.
A three-line sauce that assumes a professional kitchen with veal roasting daily and a pot of Espagnole already on the stove. The quantities are all relative, so read it as a method rather than a formula.
- What the base actually is"The gravy of roast veal" means the concentrated pan juices from a veal roast, deglazed and strained — not thickened gravy in the modern sense. Without a veal roast, a well-reduced brown veal stock gives the same body and gelatine.
- EspagnoleThe parent brown sauce: brown roux, brown stock, tomato and a mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. Any classical French cookbook of the period gives it; a modern cook can substitute a reduced brown veal stock lightly bound with beurre manié, accepting that the flavour will be cleaner and less deep.
- A ladleful and a small glassBoth are kitchen measures rather than fixed ones. A ladle might be taken as something in the region of 4 fl oz and a small glass of sherry as perhaps 2 fl oz, but the original fixes neither, so adjust to taste. The original genuinely leaves the proportions to the cook.
- The hinge: reduce, don't boil hardDemi-glace gets its gloss from slow reduction with constant skimming. A hard boil emulsifies the fat back in and clouds the sauce; keep it at a bare simmer and lift the scum as it rises.
- Cook the sherry outAdd the sherry early enough that it simmers with the sauce, or the finished sauce tastes raw and sharp. A short simmer takes the harshness off, though it will not drive off all the alcohol.
- Tammy-clothA worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A double layer of muslin in a fine conical sieve does the same job, or a chinois pressed with a small ladle.
- Holding itKeep it in a bain-marie with a film of butter or a scrap of buttered paper on the surface so it does not skin. It sets firm when cold and reheats well; it also freezes in small portions.
Demi-glace — literally "half glaze" — sits one step short of glace de viande, the syrupy meat glaze that results when brown stock is reduced almost to nothing. In the classical hierarchy, Espagnole was the mother sauce, demi-glace its refined derivative, and dozens of named small sauces followed from a spoonful of demi-glace plus a garnish or a wine. The brevity of the instruction is itself period evidence: the writer assumed a reader with veal gravy at hand, Espagnole in the stockpot, and a tammy-cloth hanging by the range.