Sauce Madère
(Madeira Sauce.) Ingredients.
One gill of good Stock.
Half a gill of Espagnole Sauce.
One glass of Madeira.
One ounce of Glaze.
Boil all these ingredients well together, then add the wine, and boil till reduced about half.
A classic reduction sauce built on two things a modern cook has to make or buy in advance: espagnole and meat glaze. Everything else is a matter of measurement and timing.
- GillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz (about 150 ml). So one gill of stock is roughly 2/3 cup US, and half a gill of espagnole about 1/3 cup.
- A glass of MadeiraA wine glass in Victorian and Edwardian recipe books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml), not a modern pour. Anything much more and the sauce will taste raw and hot until it has reduced a good deal further.
- GlazeAn ounce of glaze means glace de viande: brown stock boiled down to a sticky, near-solid syrup. It is intensely salty and gelatinous, so hold back all seasoning until the reduction is finished. Commercial demi-glace concentrate is the nearest shop-bought stand-in.
- EspagnoleThe brown mother sauce, made from brown roux, brown stock and a mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. Without it this recipe has no body; a jarred gravy is not a substitute, though a good demi-glace is.
- Order of workThe wine is listed with the ingredients but the method contradicts that: boil the stock, espagnole and glaze together first, then add the Madeira. Adding it at the start simply drives off the aromatics you are paying for.
- The reductionReduce by half over a brisk simmer, skimming the skin that forms at the side of the pan. The finished sauce should coat the back of a spoon; it thickens further as it cools.
- Which MadeiraUse a drinkable Sercial or Verdelho, or a decent rainwater. Supermarket "cooking Madeira" is often salted, and will wreck a sauce already carrying an ounce of glaze.
- YieldAbout 2/3 cup of finished sauce, which is two to four small spoonfuls over fish or a fillet of beef. Scale up if you want more than a napped spoonful each.
Madeira reached British and French kitchens as a fortified wine that survived long sea voyages, and by the nineteenth century a bottle was a common fixture in professional larders as a seasoning as much as a drink. This sauce is pure grande cuisine method: espagnole, one of the brown mother sauces codified in the French repertoire before Escoffier trimmed it back, sharpened with glace de viande and finished with wine added late so the perfume survives. High-class cookery of the period thought nothing of serving a brown, beef-stock sauce with turbot, sole or salmon, an approach that fell out of fashion as lighter fish veloutés and butter sauces took over. The instruction to boil a small quantity down by half is the whole technique, and the reason such a kitchen kept stock and glaze standing by at all times.