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Champagne Sauce
Simmer two cups Espagnole Sauce until reduced to one and one-half cups. Add two tablespoons mushroom liquor, one-half cup champagne, and one tablespoon powdered sugar.
Tomato Sauce I (without Stock) 1/2 can tomatoes or 1¾ cups fresh stewed tomatoes 1 slice onion 1/8 teaspoon pepper 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour ¼ teaspoon salt Cook onion with tomatoes fifteen minutes, rub through a strainer, and add to butter and flour (to which seasonings have been added) cooked together. If tomatoes are very acid, add a few grains of soda. If tomatoes are to retain their red color it is necessary to brown butter and flour together before adding the tomatoes.
A short finishing sauce that assumes you already have Espagnole (brown sauce) on hand — everything here depends on that base. A few of the supporting ingredients need translation.
- Espagnole firstEspagnole is the classic brown sauce: browned mirepoix and flour cooked into brown stock, simmered and strained. Two cups reduced to one and a half will take roughly 15–20 minutes at a bare simmer, skimming the skin that forms.
- Mushroom liquorThis means the strained cooking or soaking liquid from mushrooms, not an alcoholic spirit. Liquid from rehydrating dried mushrooms works, or the pan juices from sautéed ones; a canned-mushroom brine is the period equivalent but tastes tinny.
- The champagneAdd it off the heat or at the barest simmer, and only briefly. Long boiling drives off the aroma that is the entire point of the sauce and leaves a flat winy edge. Any dry sparkling wine serves; the residual bubbles do nothing.
- The sugarOne tablespoon of powdered sugar in a cup and a half of sauce is noticeable. Presumably it is there to balance the acid of the wine and the reduction's bitterness — taste after the wine goes in and add it by teaspoons rather than all at once.
- Straining and finishingPass the finished sauce through a fine sieve for a smooth gloss. A tablespoon of cold butter swirled in at the end, off the heat, is a common French finish for such sauces, though this entry does not call for it.
- Yield and useRoughly two cups once the wine and mushroom liquor go in, enough for four to six servings. The recipe does not say what it was meant to accompany; sauces of this type were generally served with poached or braised fish, sweetbreads or poultry.
Champagne Sauce belongs to the family of small compound sauces built on Espagnole, one of the mother sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens and carried into American cooking schools. Cookery-school books of the period taught a French repertoire in simplified form: rather than the days-long stock and sauce work of a professional brigade, the reader makes a batch of Espagnole and then spins off variants — Bordelaise, Mushroom, Champagne — by reduction and a few additions. Naming a sauce after champagne also did quiet work on a menu; it signalled a company dish without requiring more than half a cup of the bottle.