Matelote Sauce
INGREDIENTS.- 20 small onions, 3 oz. of butter, a lump of sugar, a glass of sherry, a gill of gravy, a dessertspoonful of flour, 1/2 pint of water, salt, pepper. AVERAGE COST, 1s. per pint.
Peel the onions and put them with the lump of sugar and a little of the butter into a quart saucepan over the fire, shake them in this and add the rest of the butter gradually. When the onions are getting brown, put in the wine and flour and stir gently with a small wooden spoon. When boiling, pour in the gravy and water and simmer till the onions are tender, then MAYONNAISE OF SALMON. season with pepper and salt and a little more sugar if liked and strain. If this sauce be not a rich deep brown, browning should be added.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Mayonnaise (Sauce or Salad Dressing for Cold Chicken, Fish and other Cold
A brown onion-and-wine sauce built like a soubise gone dark, then strained. Two of the quantities have been mangled in printing, and there is a stray line of type from the neighbouring mayonnaise entry sitting in the middle of the method.
- The stray line"MAYONNAISE OF SALMON." and the trailing sentence after "SEASONABLE at any time" belong to the next entry in the book and are not part of this sauce. Ignore them.
- A gillA quarter of an Imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or about two-thirds of a US cup. Here it means well-flavoured brown stock or meat jus, not thickened gravy from a packet.
- The missing fraction"pint of water" appears to have lost a fraction in setting; a full pint on top of the gill of gravy and the wine would be more liquid than the stated yield of a pint suggests. Half a pint (10 fl oz) is a sensible working figure, reduced down, though the original quantity cannot be recovered from the text.
- The onionsTwenty small onions means pickling or button onions, about an inch across, peeled whole. Modern frozen pearl onions will not caramelise the same way; buy them fresh and take the time to peel them.
- The hingeEverything depends on browning the onions slowly in butter and sugar before the flour goes in. Add the butter in stages as directed, keep the pan moving, and let the sugar take real colour without catching. Rushed here, the sauce stays pale and thin-tasting and no amount of browning will fix it.
- "Browning"A Victorian bottled caramel colouring, sold for exactly this purpose. A teaspoon of gravy browning or a little burnt-sugar caramel does the same job; it adds colour and a trace of bitterness, not flavour.
- A glass of sherryIn Beeton's usage a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than cream sherry, since the sauce already carries sugar.
- StrainingThe onions are cooked to give up their sweetness and then discarded. If you would rather keep them, lift them out before straining and return them whole to the finished sauce.
- Yield and useAbout a pint, enough for six to eight servings. It is a sauce for fish cooked in wine: eel, carp or pike traditionally.
Matelote comes from matelot, French for sailor, and in France it names a freshwater fish stew — eel, carp, pike or tench — cooked in wine with onions, mushrooms and lardons, the sort of thing made from whatever came out of the river. A sauce of the same name, brown, winey and heavily onioned, follows from the stew and appears in both French and English cookery of the period. Beeton's version uses sherry rather than the red or white wine a French cook would reach for. The costing of a shilling a pint makes it one of the dearer sauces here, and the wine accounts for much of that.