Sauce Réforme
Ingredients.
Half pint of Poivrade Sauce.
One tablespoonful of Red Currant Jelly.
One glass of Port Wine.
A three-line finishing sauce that assumes you already have poivrade on the stove. The book gives quantities and leaves the method to the cook, so the working order matters more than anything else here.
- The hinge: reduce the port firstBoil the port down by about half on its own before it meets the poivrade, then whisk in the jelly off a hard boil and strain. Tipping raw port into the finished sauce leaves it thin and spirity, which is the usual failure.
- Half a pintHalf a pint — Taken as an imperial half pint, that is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The recipe gives no yield, though a sauce of this quantity would cover several portions of cutlets.
- One glass of portGenuinely ambiguous. A Victorian wine glass ran about 2 fl oz, a port glass rather less; 2 to 3 fl oz is the sensible reading, and the sauce should taste of the wine without turning sweet.
- Poivrade sauceThe pepper sauce of the classic repertoire: a mirepoix sweated in fat, deglazed with vinegar and wine, moistened with espagnole or a good brown stock, simmered with crushed peppercorns added only at the end, then strained. The peppercorns go in late because long boiling turns them harsh and bitter.
- Red currant jellyRed currant jelly — Use a real set jelly, not a jam with seeds and skins. It is there for acidity and gloss as much as sweetness, so taste before adding all of it.
- What it is forThis is the sauce for cutlets Réforme. The dish proper is served with a garnish of fine julienne — cooked ham or tongue, gherkin, mushroom, truffle and hard-boiled egg white — which is added to the strained sauce or strewn over the cutlets at the last moment, not simmered in it.
- FinishingA small knob of cold butter whisked in off the heat gives the shine expected of a sauce at this level. Do not let it boil again afterwards or it will separate.
Sauce Réforme takes its name from the Reform Club in Pall Mall, and is generally traced to Alexis Soyer, the club's chef through the 1830s and 40s, whose lamb cutlets crumbed with ham and served with a sharp, sweetened pepper sauce became one of the best known dishes of nineteenth-century English club cookery. Its structure is entirely French — poivrade is a standard derivative of espagnole in the classical system — but the currant jelly and port are an English habit, the same pairing that goes to venison and mutton, and the combination is a fair picture of what high-class cooking in Britain actually meant at the time: French method, English larder. The mother sauces were the syllabus, and the small sauces were the exam.