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Sauce Matelote (With Wine and Vegetables)
(Sauce with Wine and Vegetables.) Ingredients.
Fish Stock. Half an Onion. Half a gill of Mushroom Liquor. Half a pint of Espagnole Sauce.
One ounce of Butter.
Half a gill of Burgundy.
The entry as printed is only the ingredient list; the method that would have followed in the original book is not here, and the vegetables promised in the title are missing from the list. What follows covers the units, the assumptions behind them, and what a matelote sauce normally involves.
- The measures are ImperialHalf a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. A gill in a British professional book is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is 2½ fl oz, roughly 5 tablespoons — not the 2 fl oz that American usage, where a gill is 4 fl oz, would suggest.
- Espagnole is the hingeEverything depends on the half-pint of Espagnole: a brown roux-based sauce built on veal or beef stock with mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Without it there is no sauce. A good reduced demi-glace or a well-made brown stock sauce is the practical substitute; a stock cube gravy will taste of salt and nothing else.
- The wineBurgundy here means a dry red. It should be reduced hard on its own, or with the aromatics, before the Espagnole goes in — added at the end it tastes raw and sharp.
- The butter goes in lastThe ounce of butter is a finishing enrichment, whisked in off the heat in small pieces once the sauce is no longer boiling. Cooked in, it splits out as grease on the surface.
- The missing vegetablesA classical matelote garnish is button mushrooms and small glazed onions, with the strained fish cooking liquor from the matelote itself lending flavour. The title implies them; the printed ingredient list as given does not name them.
- Strain before servingIf aromatics are simmered in the sauce, pass it through a fine sieve or chinois before the butter is added, so the finish stays glossy.
- YieldAbout 10 fl oz of finished sauce — enough for four portions of fish, or a matelote for four.
Matelote comes from the French matelot, sailor, and belongs first to a dish rather than a sauce: a stew of freshwater fish — eel, carp, pike — cooked in red wine with onions and mushrooms, associated with the rivers of Burgundy and the Loire. In the nineteenth-century professional kitchen, dishes of that kind were codified into sauces, and matelote became a red-wine brown sauce built on the day's Espagnole and finished with butter, to be served with fish. Its appearance in a printed recipe collection reflects a kitchen organised the French way, where a large batch of Espagnole simmered all morning and the individual sauces were small variations drawn off from it — a system associated with Carême and formalised later by Escoffier.