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Champagne Sauce
Add to Brown Sauce, one half cup of champagne and two tablespoons finely chopped pimentoes. 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup stock
A two-line derivative sauce that assumes you already know how to build the brown sauce printed after it. The listed butter, flour and stock are the base, not additions to it.
- Read the ingredient list backwardsThe three items at the end make the Brown Sauce itself: cook 2 tablespoons butter with 2 tablespoons flour to a nut-brown roux, whisk in 1 cup stock, and simmer until smooth and glossy. Only then add the champagne and pimentos.
- Brown the roux properlyThis is the hinge. A brown sauce takes its whole character from cooking the flour and butter to a genuine hazelnut color over moderate heat, 6 to 10 minutes, stirring. Stop at blond and the sauce tastes of raw flour under the wine.
- StockThe recipe says only 'stock', which in a book of this date would most often have meant a homemade brown veal or beef stock, generally unsalted. Commercial broth is thinner and much saltier, so hold back on seasoning until the sauce has reduced.
- Simmer the champagne outHalf a cup of wine added at the end will taste sharp and boozy unless it cooks. Add it and let the sauce simmer 5 minutes or so to lose the alcohol edge and tighten again.
- PimentoesCanned or jarred sweet red pimiento peppers, skinned and packed in brine. Drain and pat dry before chopping, or the liquid will slacken the sauce. Roasted red pepper is the nearest substitute.
- Champagne, or notAny dry sparkling wine works, and the bubbles contribute nothing once heated. A dry still white will give nearly the same result if that is what is open.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup to a cup and a half, depending on how far it is reduced. The book gives no serving suggestion; a sauce of this kind would conventionally go with roast or braised meats and poultry.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in Boston in the first decade of the twentieth century, a manufacturer-sponsored book that set its confectionery pages within a full general cookbook. This sauce belongs to the French repertoire that American household cooking had absorbed by then: a sauce espagnole or brown sauce, held as a base, then turned into a series of named derivatives by a last-minute addition of wine, herbs or garnish. The pimientos are the American touch. Canned Spanish sweet peppers are generally said to have begun arriving in quantity around the 1890s and were an inexpensive way to put color into pale food, turning up in cheese spreads and salad dressings, and here giving a plain brown sauce something to look at.