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Two Shalots (Few drops of Lemon-juice)
A few drops of Lemon-juice.
Half an ounce of Meat Glaze.
A teaspoonful of Herbs (Tarragon, Chervil, Parsley). A pinch of Salt, Pepper, and Sugar.
Chop the shalots and cook in the wine till reduced to half the quantity, then add the sauce and cook gently for twenty minutes. Skim, add the herbs chopped, the glaze, and the seasoning.
Let it boil up, and it is ready for use.
Bombay Sauce (No. 1).
Ingredients.
Two spoonfuls of Brown Sauce.
One spoonful of Curry Powder.
Two spoonfuls of Glaze.
Two spoonfuls of Tomato Sauce.
A little chopped Indian Pickle; and A little chopped or grated Ham.
Bombay Sauce for Ham or Roast Hare (No. 2).
Ingredients.
One ounce and a half of Butter.
One clove of Garlic.
This page has been set as one block, and what you are actually looking at is the tail of a shallot-and-wine sauce followed by the opening ingredient lists of two unrelated Bombay sauces. Only the first is complete enough to cook, and even that assumes you already have brown sauce and meat glaze on hand.
- The missing quantitiesThe wine is called for in the method but never measured in the surviving text, and "the sauce" is presumably the house brown sauce (espagnole) that such a book would assume on hand. For two shallots, figure on about 150 ml dry red or white wine reduced by half, then 250 ml brown sauce. Those are reasonable proportions for this style of sauce, not figures from the book.
- Meat glazeHalf an ounce is roughly a tablespoon of glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Commercial demi-glace or a reduced-stock concentrate stands in; if you use a bouillon paste, cut the added salt sharply, since classical glaze was made from unsalted stock and a modern paste is not.
- The herbs go in off the boilTarragon, chervil and parsley are added after skimming and given only the final boil-up. Chervil in particular loses its scent within a minute or two of simmering, so chop it last and do not hold the finished sauce over heat.
- Skimming is not optionalTwenty minutes of gentle cooking is there to throw fat and scum to the surface. Keep the pan at a bare tremble and off-centre on the burner so the impurities collect on one side, then lift them off before the herbs and glaze go in.
- Shallots"Shalot" is an older variant spelling. Chop them fine rather than slicing; this sauce is not strained, so the pieces stay in it.
- Sugar and lemonA pinch of sugar and a few drops of lemon are correction, not flavouring. Add them at the very end, taste, and stop as soon as the wine's edge softens.
- The Bombay saucesBoth are truncated. No. 1 gives spoonfuls of brown sauce, curry powder, glaze and tomato sauce with chopped Indian pickle and ham but no method; No. 2 breaks off after butter and garlic. Treat them as a note of proportions rather than working recipes.
- YieldOn the suggested quantities above, the finished shallot sauce would come to roughly 200 ml once reduced and skimmed; the book gives no yield.
This is the kind of sauce that Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchens knew as a shallot or Bordelaise-style reduction, and its structure follows classical French practice: an aromatic reduced in wine, let down with the house brown sauce, tightened with meat glaze and finished with fines herbes. It only works if the kitchen already has espagnole and glaze standing by, which is why a professional book could print it in four lines while a household manual of the same date would need two pages. The Bombay sauces alongside it show the other half of the period's repertoire: curry powder, tomato and chopped Indian pickle stirred into a French base, a compromise dish of the imperial dining room; the second is headed "for Ham or Roast Hare."