Espagnole
Ingredients.
One pint of Brown Stock.
Two ounces of Butter.
One Carrot. One small Onion. Two ounces of Flour. } ८ Roux. Six Mushrooms or Mushroom Trimmings. Two ounces of Ham or lean Bacon. Mirepoix. One small Bouquet Garni. One gill of Tomato Purée. One glass of Claret or Sherry.
This entry is a shorthand ingredient list of the kind common in professional manuals, where the method was assumed knowledge. What follows is what a cook needs to turn it into sauce.
- The pintIf this is a British book, the pint is an Imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups. With 2 oz each of butter and flour the finished sauce will be thick enough to coat; slacken with more stock if you want a pouring consistency.
- Roux is the hingeThe bracketed "Roux" means the butter and flour are cooked together before the stock goes in, and for espagnole they must be cooked to a genuine hazelnut brown over low heat. Rushing it gives either a pale sauce that tastes of raw flour or a scorched one that turns bitter, and no amount of simmering afterwards will correct either.
- Brown stockMeaning stock from roasted veal and beef bones with browned vegetables, unsalted and unthickened. A good commercial veal or beef stock will do, but choose an unsalted one: the sauce reduces and salt concentrates.
- Mushroom trimmingsStalks, peelings and caps too broken to serve, saved from other dishes in a working kitchen. Six whole mushrooms, roughly chopped, do the same job; they go in with the stock to infuse rather than to be eaten.
- Simmering and skimmingEspagnole is not a quick white sauce. Bring it to a bare simmer and hold it there 30 to 45 minutes, skimming the scum and fat that rise, then strain through a fine sieve or muslin, pressing the mushrooms. Skimming is what makes the sauce clear and glossy instead of cloudy.
- Seasoning lastNo salt is listed because the sauce is a base for other preparations and will be seasoned when it becomes, say, a sauce Madère or a sauce Robert. Taste and salt only at the point of serving.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of finished sauce after reduction and straining. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and freezes well.
Espagnole is one of the great foundation sauces of French cookery, generally credited to Careme's codification in the early nineteenth century and inherited by Escoffier as one of the leading sauces from which dozens of small sauces are derived. The name means simply "Spanish", and the usual explanation, traditional rather than documented, is that Spanish cooks in the French royal kitchens enriched the brown sauce with their own ham and tomatoes. Its appearance here, as a bare list of proportions with no method attached, suggests a book written for cooks already trained in the French manner, who needed proportions rather than instruction. The sauce survives in professional kitchens, though many now build a brown sauce on reduced veal stock alone and skip the flour entirely.