Home › Sauces for Meat and Vegetables › Espagnole Sauce
Espagnole Sauce
Melt two tablespoons butter; add two tablespoons each of onion, celery, ham, red pepper, and parsley, three tablespoons flour, one half teaspoon salt, few grains cayenne and two cups white stock. Cook one hour. Strain, serve.
A very compressed version of the classic brown sauce, written for cooks who already knew what the vegetables should look like before the stock goes in. The whole character of the sauce depends on how far you take the butter, flour and aromatics before liquid arrives.
- Brown the roux, or it isn't espagnoleThe recipe says only "melt" and "cook," but a sauce called espagnole is expected to be brown. Cook the butter, vegetables, ham and flour together over moderate heat until the flour smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell, then add the stock. Stop short of that and what you have is closer to a velouté.
- The vegetable measuresTwo tablespoons each presumably means finely chopped and measured after chopping: onion, celery, lean ham, sweet red pepper and parsley. "Red pepper" here is most likely the fresh sweet pepper, since cayenne is listed separately.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock, unsalted or very lightly salted. Modern boxed broth is already seasoned, so hold back the half teaspoon of salt until the sauce has reduced and then taste.
- One hour, and what it doesAn hour at a bare simmer is not excessive here. It cooks out any raw flour taste, softens the aromatics so they give up their flavour to the strainer, and reduces two cups of stock down toward a sauce consistency. Keep the heat low and skim the scum and fat that rise.
- Expect reductionTwo cups of stock with three tablespoons flour will thicken considerably over an hour. Add a little more stock or water if it tightens past coating consistency before the time is up.
- Strain properlyPress the solids against a fine sieve rather than letting the sauce drip through, to recover what the vegetables and ham still hold.
- YieldRoughly one to one and a quarter cups after straining and reduction, enough for four to six servings alongside beef, veal or roast vegetables. It keeps several days refrigerated and reheats well with a splash of stock.
Espagnole is one of the sauces Antonin Carême codified in the early nineteenth century and Escoffier later fixed as a mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, aromatics, long cooking, strained. Why it is called Spanish is unsettled; the usual story, told more often than it is documented, credits Spanish cooks at the French court and the Spanish tomato or pepper. This version shows how thoroughly French sauce vocabulary had entered ordinary American home cooking — the name stands alone, and the browning, skimming and reducing are left out of the four printed sentences. The ham and sweet pepper appear to stand in for the more elaborate mirepoix and tomato of the restaurant kitchen, and white stock replaces the long-simmered brown estouffade that no domestic cook was likely to keep on hand.