Home › Sauces › Poivrade Sauce
Poivrade Sauce
Ingredients.
Half a pint of Espagnole Sauce.
Half a pint of Vinegar.
This entry is a formula rather than a method — two quantities and no instructions, as was common in cookery-school notebooks where the technique was demonstrated in class. Filling in what the book assumes is most of the work.
- The hinge: reduce the vinegar firstHalf a pint of vinegar poured unreduced into half a pint of sauce would be undrinkable. In classical practice the vinegar is boiled down hard first — commonly to a quarter of its volume or less, until it is barely a syrupy glaze in the pan — before the Espagnole goes in. What remains is aroma and a clean edge of acid, not sourness. The book states none of this; it is the step the entry assumes.
- Imperial pintsRead as imperial measure, a pint is 20 fl oz and half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups or 280 ml. Reduced as above, the two half-pints should give somewhere near 10-12 fl oz of finished sauce.
- EspagnoleA brown mother sauce: brown roux, veal or beef stock, browned mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A good reduced brown stock or a well-made demi-glace stands in for it; a jarred gravy will not, since the whole point is a sauce with enough body to carry the vinegar.
- Which vinegarRed or white wine vinegar. Malt vinegar and distilled white vinegar were both on Victorian shelves but give a harsh, flat result here. Modern wine vinegars run around 6-7 percent acetic acid.
- The pepper the recipe forgotPoivrade means peppered, and the pepper is not listed. Add about a teaspoon of coarsely crushed black peppercorns to the vinegar reduction, or in the last ten minutes of simmering if you want it sharper. Pepper boiled at length in the finished sauce turns bitter and dusty.
- Aromatics assumed by the kitchenClassical practice reduces the vinegar with a sweated mirepoix of carrot, onion, celery and a little thyme and bay, plus trimmings from the game being served. The bare two-ingredient version works, but the vegetables are what make it taste like poivrade rather than sour gravy.
- Strain and finishPass the sauce through a fine sieve or muslin, pressing the solids, then hold it below a boil. A knob of cold butter whisked in off the heat gives it gloss; a spoonful of redcurrant jelly is the usual correction if the acid is still forward.
- ServingThis is a sauce for venison, hare, saddle of mutton and roast game birds. Send it separately in a boat rather than napping the meat.
Poivrade is one of the oldest surviving lines in European sauce cookery: the medieval and Renaissance kitchen leaned heavily on vinegar and pepper together, and the sharp peppered sauces for game predate the brown-stock system by centuries. What happened in the nineteenth century is that the old sauce was rebuilt on Carême's foundation sauces, and the entry here reduces it to Espagnole plus a vinegar reduction — a shorthand rather than the full period definition, since contemporary codifications still call for peppercorns and a mirepoix. It also reflects the place of game in a high-class Victorian menu, where venison and hare arrived from the estate and wanted a sauce with enough acid to cut a rich, well-hung roast.