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Pepper Sauce
To Brown Sauce add two tablespoons chopped pepper, one tablespoon chopped onion, or a clove of garlick, one teaspoon parsley, one teaspoon kitchen bouquet. Simmer one half hour, strain and serve. 3 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour teaspoon salt 1½ cups Brown Stock 1 teaspoon pepper
This is a derived sauce: the ingredient list tacked on the end is the Brown Sauce base, and the instructions are what you add to it. Read it as two steps.
- Make the base firstMelt 3 tablespoons butter, stir in 4 tablespoons flour, and cook the roux over medium-low heat until it is the color of a walnut shell, several minutes at least. Whisk in 1½ cups hot brown stock, add the salt, and simmer until smooth before anything else goes in.
- "Chopped pepper" means green bell pepper"Chopped pepper" here most likely means sweet green bell pepper, seeds and ribs removed; in American books of this period an unqualified "pepper" given in a vegetable quantity usually means that. Two tablespoons is only a small piece of one pepper.
- The teaspoon of pepper in the baseA full teaspoon of ground black pepper in 1½ cups of sauce is aggressive by current taste and the amount is not clearly specified as ground or whole. Start with a quarter teaspoon and correct at the end, or use whole peppercorns since the sauce is strained anyway.
- Kitchen BouquetStill sold: a caramel-and-vegetable browning sauce. It is for color and depth, not salt. A teaspoon is enough to darken this quantity noticeably, so add it after tasting the salt level rather than before.
- Garlic or onion, not bothThe original offers a choice. One clove of garlic gives a sharper, more southern-French character; the tablespoon of onion gives a rounder, sweeter sauce. Either will be strained out.
- The half-hour simmerKeep it at a bare simmer with the pan partly covered and stir now and then, or the flour will catch on the bottom and the sauce will taste scorched. Expect to lose about a quarter of the volume.
- StrainingPush the sauce through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle to get the flavor out of the aromatics, then discard the solids. If it has thickened past coating consistency, thin it with a little more hot stock.
- YieldAbout a cup after simmering and straining, enough for four servings with steak, chops, or roasted vegetables. It reheats well and thickens further in the refrigerator.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer. Sauces like this one belong to the American domestic-science reading of the classic French sauce espagnole, which long predates Escoffier and is generally traced to Carême and earlier French practice: a brown roux, brown stock, and a family of small sauces built on top by adding aromatics and simmering them out. The presence of Kitchen Bouquet is the giveaway that this is an American kitchen rather than a French one — the branded browning liquid, on the market by the late nineteenth century, let a cook get the deep color that in a professional kitchen came from long-reduced stock and patiently browned bones.