Home › Entrées › One Tomato (Gill of Sherry)
One Tomato (Gill of Sherry)
One gill of Sherry.
A few drops of Lemon-juice.
A Bayleaf, Thyme, Shalot.
A few Mushrooms.
Fry the bones in the butter with the herbs, add the flour and brown; then add the stock, tomato, and mushrooms; cook these well till reduced to half a pint; add the sherry and lemon-juice, strain, and pour over the Chartreuse.
This is the tail end of a brown sauce built on roasted bones — an espagnole in miniature — written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the base quantities were assumed. Read it as a method rather than a formula.
- Missing quantitiesButter, flour, stock and the bones are named but never measured; the amounts are presumably carried over from the preceding entry or from a standard brown sauce. For roughly the half pint of finished sauce called for, about 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and a pint of brown stock would be consistent.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, about 142 ml, or a generous half cup. It is a substantial amount of sherry in a half-pint sauce, so a dry sherry rather than a sweet one suits it.
- Half a pintImperial measure: 10 fl oz, about 285 ml. That is the target after reduction, and it is what governs how long the sauce simmers rather than any clock time.
- The bonesWhatever meat the chartreuse is built from supplies them — game, poultry or veal. Brown them hard in the butter before the flour goes in; the colour of the finished sauce comes from that stage and from cooking the flour to a nut brown, not from browning after the liquid is added.
- ShalotOne shallot, peeled and left whole or halved. It is strained out with the bay and thyme, so no fine chopping is needed.
- TomatoA single tomato in a sauce like this contributes acidity and colour more than any pronounced tomato flavour. A fresh one, roughly chopped, skin and seeds included since the sauce is strained.
- Sherry and lemon go in lastBoth are added after the reduction, as the recipe directs; it does not specify whether the pan is off the heat. Long cooking drives off the sherry's aroma and dulls the lemon.
- Strain and serve at onceStrain -- Pass through a fine sieve, then pour over the moulded chartreuse as the recipe directs.
A chartreuse in nineteenth-century cookery is a moulded entrée: strips of vegetable or forcemeat lining a plain mould, filled with game, poultry or a salpicon, steamed and turned out whole. The name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks, whose meatless diet supposedly gave rise to a dish of vegetables concealing something richer inside — a story difficult to document. Sauces like this one, thickened with a browned roux, reduced hard and finished with sherry and a squeeze of lemon, are the workhorses of that style of cooking: made from the bones of the very bird or joint they will accompany, strained, and poured over the chartreuse. The abbreviated way this entry is written, with the butter, flour and stock left unstated, suggests readers who already had the brown sauce by heart.