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Sauce Aigre-Douce
Ingredients.
Half a small Onion.
Half a teaspoonful of Castor Sugar.
Half a glass of White Wine.
Two dessertspoonfuls of Red Currant Jelly.
Half an ounce of Butter.
Half a pint of Espagnole Sauce.
Saltspoonful of dry Mustard.
Peel and mince the onion, fry it in the butter till a nut-brown colour, add the mustard, moisten with the wine, and reduce a little. Add in the Espagnole sauce and the red currant jelly, cook gently for ten minutes, season to taste and strain.
Use as directed on page 68 for Ailerons de
A short sweet-sour brown sauce built on espagnole, which is the only real work in it. Everything else takes fifteen minutes.
- Espagnole is the hingeHalf a pint of espagnole means half an Imperial pint, 10 fl oz, of properly made brown sauce: a brown roux moistened with brown stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed until glossy. A good reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly with beurre manié gives a closer result than a stock cube and cornflour, which will taste thin under the jelly.
- Half a glass of white wine'Wineglassful' was an imprecise measure, usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz in English cookery books, though glasses varied; read half a glass as somewhere between 1 and 2 fl oz (30-60 ml) of dry white. Nothing sweet -- the jelly and sugar supply all the sweetness the sauce needs.
- Small spoon measuresA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons, so two of them is a generous tablespoon of redcurrant jelly. A saltspoon is usually reckoned at a quarter teaspoon.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Half a teaspoon dissolves instantly in the hot sauce; granulated works if you give it a moment.
- Nut-brown, not scorchedTake the onion in the butter over moderate heat until it is genuinely brown, since that colour is most of the depth here. If any of it blackens, start again -- burnt onion in a half-pint of sauce is unrecoverable, and the strainer will not remove the bitterness.
- Add the mustard off the boilDry mustard turns harsh and slightly bitter when fried hard. Stir it into the browned onion with the pan pulled back, then add the wine at once.
- Ten minutes means ten minutesA gentle simmer only. Redcurrant jelly held at a boil goes dull and cloying, and the sauce will tighten past coating consistency very quickly at this volume.
- YieldRoughly half a pint once reduced, enough for several portions of the ailerons directed to on page 68. Strain into a warmed sauceboat; it thickens noticeably as it cools.
Aigre-douce is simply French for sour-sweet, and the pairing of vinegar or wine with fruit jelly in a brown sauce is one of the oldest surviving flavour ideas in European cookery -- medieval and Renaissance kitchens commonly sweetened and soured meat sauces, and the taste retreated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a handful of accompaniments for game, ham and pork. By the time this book was written, that older sweet-sour tradition had been tidied into the classical repertoire as a small derivative of espagnole, one of the grand sauces, made in half-pint batches. The redcurrant jelly is the British inflection: it was a jelly long associated with mutton, venison and hare.