Twenty-four Peppercorns

This is a pepper sauce — poivrade — printed in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where the ingredient list lived in the title and the Espagnole was already sitting in the stock pot. A few things need filling in before it will work at home.

• The missing quantitiesThe original gives only the peppercorns: no vinegar, no Espagnole, no yield. A workable reconstruction for twenty-four crushed peppercorns is about a gill (a scant cup short measure, roughly 5 fl oz) of vinegar reduced away, then about a pint of Espagnole. These figures are a modern guess, not the author's and not attested practice.
• EspagnoleThe brown mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A good reduced veal demi-glace stands in for it directly. Canned brown gravy does not.
• "Till quite reduced"Reduce the vinegar until the pan is almost dry and the liquid just films the bottom — au sec. Stopping early leaves the sauce sharp and thin; the whole point is to burn off the water and keep the acid's aroma.
• Crush, do not grindCracked peppercorns release their oils into the vinegar and are then strained out. Ground pepper passes through the cloth and turns the sauce gritty and harsh.
• Ten minutes and no morePepper held long in a hot sauce goes from fragrant to bitter and flatly hot. The short simmer is deliberate; taste at eight minutes.
• TammyA worsted or cheesecloth straining cloth, wrung between two people in a professional kitchen. A fine conical strainer lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same job.
• Yield and useThe recipe states no yield; on the reconstructed quantities above it would come to roughly a pint. Poivrade is the classic accompaniment to venison, hare and roast game, and takes well to a spoonful of redcurrant jelly at the end.