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Creole Sauce
2 tablespoons chopped onion 4 tablespoons green pepper, finely chopped 2 tablespoons butter 2 tomatoes 1/4 cup sliced mushrooms 6 olives, stoned 1⅓ cups Brown Sauce Salt and pepper Sherry wine Cook onion and pepper with butter five minutes; add tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives, and cook two minutes, then add Brown Sauce. Bring to boiling-point, and add wine to taste. Serve with broiled beefsteak or fillet of beef. Boiled rice should accompany the beef, and be served on same platter. 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour ¼ teaspoon salt 1 cup White Stock III Few grains pepper
A quick composed sauce built on a pre-made brown sauce, meant to be finished in minutes while the steak rests. Almost all the work is in the base.
- Brown Sauce firstThe recipe assumes you already have 1 1/2 cups of the book's Brown Sauce (a roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, moistened with brown stock). A good demi-glace or a reduced beef stock thickened with a brown roux stands in; a packet gravy will taste flat under the tomato and olive.
- The tomatoesThe recipe says only "2 tomatoes"; two ripe medium ones, chopped (peeled and seeded if you prefer), come to roughly a cup. In winter a scant cup of drained canned tomato is a reasonable substitute for a hard fresh one.
- Two minutes is deliberateTwo minutes only -- the tomatoes, mushrooms and olives go in briefly before the sauce arrives, which keeps them as distinct pieces rather than reducing them to a stew.
- Olives"stoned" simply means pitted. Green olives in brine are the likely intent. Slice or quarter them, and taste before adding salt, since brine plus reduced brown sauce can carry much of the seasoning.
- The sherryThe recipe brings the sauce to boiling-point and then adds wine to taste; a tablespoon of dry sherry is a reasonable starting amount for this quantity. Taking the pan off a hard boil before adding it will preserve more of the aroma.
- Green pepperFour tablespoons finely chopped is about half a small bell pepper. Cook it with the onion the full five minutes over gentle heat so it softens without colouring.
- YieldMakes roughly two to two and a half cups, enough for four to six servings of steak with rice.
These "Creole" sauces belong to a turn-of-the-century Northern shorthand in which onion, celery and bell pepper -- the aromatic base conventionally associated with Louisiana cooking -- signalled New Orleans to a Boston reader, whatever else went into the pan. The olives, mushrooms and sherry here read as additions from outside any Creole household, and the structure looks like something close to brown-sauce practice: keep a mother sauce on hand, then finish small quantities of it to order with a garnish and a splash of wine. The instruction to serve boiled rice on the same platter as the beef tells you how the dish was read at table -- as a touch of the exotic on a thoroughly conventional broiled steak.