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Sauce for the Above (IV)
Ingredients.
Half a pint of Brown Sauce.
Half a pint of Tomato Sauce.
Half a gill of Sherry.
A compound sauce given as a bare ingredient list, in the Victorian manner where the method was assumed known: the two sauces are combined, reduced slightly, and the sherry added at the end. A few conversions and one point of technique are worth setting down.
- The measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups) and a gill is 5 fl oz. Half a gill of sherry is therefore 2½ fl oz, roughly 5 tablespoons.
- Brown sauce means espagnoleBrown sauce here is a made sauce, not the bottled brown sauce of a modern British table. In books of this kind it is usually something on the espagnole model — brown stock thickened with a dark roux, often with mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed — though a plainer made brown gravy is also possible. A demi-glace or a well-reduced homemade brown stock sauce is the nearest substitute.
- Tomato sauce means the savoury cooked sauceIn this period that is a stock-based tomato sauce, sieved and seasoned, not ketchup and not a pasta sugo with garlic and basil. Anything sweetened will unbalance the finished sauce.
- Add the sherry lastAdd the sherry last — the recipe gives no method, but the usual practice with a fortified wine is to combine and simmer the two sauces briefly, then stir in the sherry off the boil. Sherry boiled hard loses its aroma and leaves the acidity behind.
- Which sherryWhich sherry — a dry or medium sherry suits the sauce better than a cream sherry, which will read as cloying against the tomato. Avoid bottles sold as cooking sherry, which may be salted.
- Consistency and finishingThe tomato thins the espagnole, so expect to reduce a little to a coating consistency. Pass through a fine strainer and check the seasoning at the end, since reduction concentrates the salt already in both base sauces.
- YieldYield — the ingredients total about 22½ fl oz, a little over an imperial pint, and less after any reduction.
The title tells you how these books were built: recipes ran in sequence, and a sauce belonged to the dish printed immediately above it rather than standing on its own. The formula itself belongs to the grande cuisine method, in which a kitchen kept a few mother sauces on hand and produced dozens of named derivatives by combining and finishing them. Espagnole lightened with tomato and lifted with a fortified wine is one of the commonest of these; sauces of a loosely comparable kind appear in the French repertoire under names such as sauce Portugaise and sauce Italienne. Sherry, rather than madeira, points to the British table.