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Financière Sauce
Ingredients.
Quarter of a pint of Sherry.
One ounce of Butter.
One ounce of Glaze.
One tablespoonful of chopped Mushrooms or Truffles.
Half a pint of Brown Sauce.
Put the sherry, butter, glaze, and chopped mushrooms or truffles into a stewpan, and cook for five minutes. Then add the brown sauce; boil till it coats the spoon. Strain, and it is ready to serve.
FINANCIÈRE RAGOÛT.
A classic escoffier-era compound sauce built on two things a Victorian kitchen always had to hand and a modern one rarely does: meat glaze and a pot of brown sauce. Sort those out and the rest takes ten minutes.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (about 150 ml) of sherry; half a pint of brown sauce is 10 fl oz (about 300 ml). British pints, not American: a US pint is 16 fl oz rather than 20, so US measures give you about a fifth less sauce overall (the sherry-to-sauce ratio is unaffected).
- Glaze"Glaze" is glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. An ounce is roughly a heaped tablespoon. Commercial demi-glace or a reduced-stock concentrate stands in; a stock cube does not, as it is mostly salt and will wreck the seasoning once the sauce is reduced.
- Brown sauceNot bottled brown sauce. In a book of this kind it means a made brown sauce of the espagnole family: brown roux and brown stock, usually with mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed. Bought demi-glace is the practical substitute; if you use it, cut or omit the extra glaze.
- The hinge"Boil till it coats the spoon" is the whole sauce. Reduce until it films the back of a spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean line — nappe. Under-reduced it tastes thin and raw-sherry; pushed too far it turns salty and tacky, because the glaze concentrates with it.
- Cook the sherry outThe five minutes at the start appears to be there to reduce the wine and cook off its rawness before the brown sauce goes in. Cut it short and the finished sauce can keep a harsh spirity edge.
- Mushrooms or trufflesThey flavour the sauce and are then thrown away at the strainer — this is a seasoning, not a garnish. Cheap trimmings and stalks do the job for the mushroom version; if using truffle, add it off the heat for the last minute of the initial cooking so the aroma is not boiled off.
- Why strainStraining through a fine sieve or muslin catches the aromatics and any roux specks, giving a smooth, glossy finish. Keep it warm in a bain-marie with a scrap of butter on the surface to stop a skin forming.
- Yield and useRoughly 300 ml of finished sauce, enough for four to six. It belongs with sweetbreads, veal, poached chicken and vol-au-vent; the Financière Ragoût that follows in the book presumably turns the same sauce into a garnished ragoût.
Financière is one of the grand garnitures of nineteenth-century French service, and the name is traditionally explained as a joke about money: a ragoût of truffles, cockscombs, kidneys, quenelles and olives, moistened with madeira or sherry, was held to be food for financiers rather than households. It appears in a book like this one because British high-class cookery of the later nineteenth century leaned heavily on French terms and methods, with professional cooks working from a small stock of foundation sauces - here a brown sauce and meat glaze - made in quantity and then turned into named derivatives by additions of wine and aromatics. The system is generally traced to Carême and was codified for the next generation by Escoffier; the survival of "financière" on menus long after the ragoût itself vanished says a good deal about how much of that vocabulary was kept for its prestige.