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Madeira Sauce
1 teaspoon kitchen bouquet 1 tablespoon chopped celery 1 tablespoon chopped pimento 4 tablespoons Madeira few grains cayenne Combine all ingredients, except Madeira; simmer one half hour. Add Madeira and serve.
Maître d'Hôtel Sauce 3 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1 teaspoon paprika 3 tablespoons parsley cayenne Cream the butter and add remaining ingredients.
Two sauces run together here, and the Madeira one is printed short: as written there is no liquid to simmer for half an hour. Lowney's assumed the reader would start from a brown sauce or espagnole already on the stove, so treat this as flavouring instructions rather than a complete formula.
- The missing baseThe ingredient list here begins mid-way, so a liquid base was probably printed in lines that have not come through. As it stands, a half-hour simmer of a teaspoon of Kitchen Bouquet and two tablespoons of chopped vegetables would scorch dry in minutes. To reconstruct it, build on roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of brown sauce or reduced beef stock, which the listed seasonings will flavour comfortably.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still sold today. It contributes colour and a faint roasted sweetness rather than much seasoning, so salt separately. Gravy Master or a few drops of dark soy will stand in.
- PimentoIn 1907 this means canned sweet red pimiento peppers, drained and chopped, not the allspice sense of the word and not paprika. Jarred roasted red pepper is the closest current equivalent.
- Add the Madeira off the boilThis is the hinge. The wine goes in at the end and the sauce is served; boiling it drives off the aromatics that are the whole point. Warm through for a minute at most.
- Which MadeiraA Sercial or Verdelho gives the dry, nutty note intended for beef and game. Supermarket "cooking Madeira" is salted and will throw the seasoning off.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is a pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon. It should register as warmth behind the wine, not as heat.
- YieldThe original gives none. If you build on about 1 1/2 cups of brown sauce, that is roughly what you will finish with, enough to sauce four to six portions of beef, fillet or tongue.
- The second recipeMaître d'Hôtel Sauce is a compound butter, not a cooked sauce. Cream 3 tablespoons soft butter with the lemon juice added a little at a time so it does not split, roll in parchment, chill, and cut coins to melt over grilled steak or fish. Three tablespoons of parsley means chopped, packed loosely.
Madeira sauce belongs to the classical French brown-sauce family that American cookbooks absorbed wholesale in the late nineteenth century: a demi-glace or espagnole finished with fortified wine at the last moment. Madeira itself reached New England kitchens through a long-standing Atlantic trade — the wine was fortified and heated to survive the voyage, which is why it keeps almost indefinitely once opened and why it outlasted more delicate wines in the American pantry. Its appearance in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook is a reminder of what these volumes actually were: Lowney's published a full general household cookery, with the company's cocoa woven through the sweet chapters, so the meat and sauce sections read like any competent turn-of-the-century domestic-science manual. The entry as it stands lists no stock and gives no yield.