Home › Sauce Recipes › Espagnole Sauce
Espagnole Sauce
2 ozs. (2 heaping tablespoonfuls) butter 2 tablespoonfuls flour 1 pint (2 cups) brown stock I carrot I shallot I small onion I small slice ham 1 wineglassful sherry wine 1 gill (1/2 cup) tomato sauce Salt and pepper Wash and prepare the vegetables, slice and dice them. Heat the butter in a casserole, put in the vegetables and ham, then fry them a good brown color.
Stir in the flour and brown it slightly, add the stock, stir it over the fire till it boils, then add the wine, tomato sauce, and salt and pepper to taste. Let it come to boiling point, then skim it well, strain it, and it is ready for use.
A compact, workable version of the classic brown sauce, scaled for a household rather than a hotel kitchen. The whole thing hinges on how far you take the colour of the butter, vegetables and flour before the stock goes in.
- "Casserole" means a panHere the casserole is used on the burner: the butter is heated in it and the vegetables fried, so it is a flameproof pan rather than a baking dish. Use a heavy saucepan or small Dutch oven that browns evenly.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so the tomato sauce is 4 fl oz. A wineglassful in this period is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup) of sherry. Two ounces of butter is 4 level tablespoons, which is what the book means by "2 heaping tablespoonfuls."
- Brown the roux properly"Brown it slightly" undersells it. The flour should go to the colour of a hazelnut shell over moderate heat, three to five minutes of steady stirring, or the sauce tastes pasty and thin no matter how long it simmers.
- Brown stockThis means beef or veal bones and trimmings browned before simmering. A good low-salt beef or veal stock stands in; bouillon cubes and reduced commercial demi-glace will both make the finished sauce too salty once it reduces.
- The hamA slice of raw or lightly cured ham is a seasoning, not a component. Prosciutto trimmings, pancetta or a scrap of unsmoked gammon do the same job; heavy smoke will dominate.
- Simmer before strainingThe instruction to bring it just to a boil and strain gives a sauce that is barely cooked. Fifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer after the stock goes in lets the flour lose its raw edge and the vegetables give something up. Skim the grey foam as it rises.
- Strain and pressPush the solids firmly in the sieve, then discard them. The finished sauce should coat a spoon lightly; if it is too thick, loosen with stock rather than water.
- YieldAbout 2 to 2 1/2 cups after skimming and straining, enough for four to six servings. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and freezes well in small portions.
Espagnole is one of the mother sauces codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking, described by Carême and later by Escoffier as a brown roux moistened with brown stock, enriched with a mirepoix and a little cured pork, and simmered long before straining. Its name means simply "Spanish", and the usual explanation, traditional rather than documented, credits Spanish cooks at the French court with adding tomato to the brown sauce; the tomato sauce and sherry here are what keep that story alive. What makes this version interesting is the compression. A restaurant espagnole was built over many hours from a stock already thickened and cleared, while here the entire sauce is a single pan, one pint of stock, and a few minutes on the fire, which is exactly the promise casserole cookery made to households working without a brigade of cooks.