Home › Sauces › Sauce Piquante
Sauce Piquante
1 cup brown sauce 1 tablespoon vinegar 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon chopped capers 1 tablespoon chopped pickle 1/2 teaspoon tarragon vinegar Make the brown sauce; add the other ingredients and serve.
A classic sharp brown sauce, written in the shorthand of a book that assumed you already had brown sauce on the stove. The whole dish depends on the base, which the recipe does not give here.
- The brown sauce is the recipeIn a book of this period, "brown sauce" means espagnole or a simple sauce brune: butter and flour cooked to a nut-brown roux, moistened with beef or veal stock, and simmered until glossy. A cup of thin gravy or a bouillon cube will give you a thin, salty sauce; use a properly reduced brown stock.
- Reduce the vinegar firstModern practice sweats the onion in a little butter, adds the plain vinegar, and boils it down to almost nothing before the brown sauce goes in. Stirring raw vinegar into finished sauce, as written, leaves a raw acetic edge that never softens.
- Capers and pickle go in lastBoth are already pickled and both go dull with heat. Add them off the fire, or in the final half minute, so they stay distinct against the brown base.
- "Pickle" means cucumber"Pickle" most likely means cucumber -- In American books of this era an unqualified chopped pickle most often means a sour or dill cucumber pickle rather than a sweet one, though usage varied. Cornichons are close to what a French-trained cook would have used.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a few sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. It is a finishing note, added off the heat; half a teaspoon in a cup of sauce is deliberately restrained.
- Chop everything fineThe garnish should be a scatter, not a relish. Onion, capers and pickle all cut to roughly the size of the capers keeps the sauce spoonable over a cutlet.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a quarter of sauce. It belongs with grilled or fried pork, veal cutlets, leftover roast reheated in the sauce, or a plain boiled tongue.
Sauce piquante is one of the small compound sauces of the French repertoire, built on espagnole and defined by the trio of acid, onion and something pickled. Escoffier's codification of the sauce families around the turn of the twentieth century put many such derivatives into the standard training, and sauces of this type were familiar in American cookery writing of the period, which may be why a domestic book aimed at householders lists it with no more ceremony than a paragraph. Its practical use in a home kitchen was economy: a sharp brown sauce makes reheated meat taste intentional. The name simply means "sharp" or "pungent" sauce, and it should not be confused with the Louisiana sauce piquante, a tomato-and-cayenne stew of the same name that developed on a separate track.