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Sauce Demi-glace
(Half-glaze Sauce.) Ingredients.
Half pint Gravy from Roast Meat; Or, a gill of Liquid Meat Glaze.
Half gill Brown Sauce or Espagnole Sauce.
One glass Sherry.
Reduce the gravy to half its original quantity, add the brown sauce and sherry, boil up, skim, and strain. Season to taste with pepper and salt.
If meat glaze is used in place of gravy, warm up in the bain-marie, add sauce and wine, stir over the fire until it boils, then strain, season and serve.
A short-cut demi-glace built on roasting-pan gravy rather than the multi-day classical reduction. The quantities are small and the whole thing takes minutes once the base is in hand.
- The unitsA gill is a quarter pint; in imperial measure that is about 5 fl oz, so half a gill is roughly 2½ fl oz. Half a pint of gravy is about 10 imperial fl oz (a US cup is 8). One "glass" of sherry means a wine glass, conventionally about 2 fl oz.
- What "gravy from roast meat" meansNot thickened pan gravy but the clear, fatty juices left in the roasting tin. Pour them off, let the fat rise, and skim it away before reducing, or the sauce will never clear.
- Liquid meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a sticky, syrupy jelly. Commercial glace or a good demi-glace concentrate stands in directly; a stock cube does not, being mostly salt and lacking the gelatine that gives the sauce its body.
- EspagnoleThe classical brown mother sauce, made from brown stock thickened with a brown roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato. Any well-made brown sauce with real gelatine in it will do the job here.
- The hinge: skim, then strainReducing drives fat and coagulated protein to the surface, and both dull the gloss expected of the finished sauce. Skim patiently as it boils, then pass through a fine chinois or muslin.
- The sherry goes in near the endAdd it as directed, boil up briefly to burn off the raw alcohol, and stop there. Long reduction after the wine goes in makes the sauce taste flat and slightly bitter. A dry or medium amontillado suits better than a cream sherry.
- Season lastMeat glaze and reduced gravy are already concentrated in salt, so the seasoning instruction sits at the end of the method for a reason. Taste after straining.
- YieldSomething under a cup of finished sauce, enough to nap four small portions of beef, tongue or game. It thickens further as it cools and reheats well in a bain-marie.
Demi-glace sits at the centre of the nineteenth-century French sauce system: espagnole and brown stock reduced together by half until the sauce coats a spoon and shines, the "half glaze" being the stage short of the solid glace de viande. Codified in the great French kitchens and inherited by Escoffier, it reached British high-class cookery through the French-trained chefs who staffed country houses, hotels and clubs, and through the cookery schools that trained cooks to serve them. What is telling here is the concession in the first line: a proper demi-glace begins days earlier with bones, but this version lets a household cook start from the juices in the roasting tin or a spoonful of bought glaze. That is the practical compromise of the period's manuals, which taught the classical repertoire to kitchens that had neither the brigade nor the stockpot to support it.