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Sauce (Tablespoon finely chopped)
1/4 cup butter. 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion 1 slice carrot, cut in cubes 1 slice turnip, cut in cubes 1/4 cup flour 2 cups boiling water ½ cup stewed and strained tomato 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne Cook butter five minutes with vegetables. Add flour, with salt, pepper, and cayenne, and cook until flour is well browned. Add gradually water and tomato; cook five minutes, then strain.
A browned-flour sauce in the Espagnole family, thinned with water rather than stock. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the method first.
- The missing butterThe method opens with "Cook butter five minutes with vegetables" but no butter appears in the list — apparently dropped in setting the type. For 1/4 cup flour, use 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) butter, the equal-measure proportion this style of book uses for a roux.
- Browning the flour is the whole pointThe colour and the nutty flavour come from cooking the roux until it is genuinely brown, which takes several minutes of stirring over moderate heat, not the moment or two a white sauce needs. Stop while it smells like toast; once it smells scorched the sauce will be bitter.
- Browned flour thickens lessHeat breaks down some of the starch, so a brown roux has perhaps two-thirds the thickening power of a pale one. Two cups of liquid to 1/4 cup flour gives a thin, pourable sauce — correct for this style, but do not expect gravy body.
- "Stewed and strained tomato"Home-cooked tomatoes pushed through a sieve. Half a cup of canned tomato purée or passata is the direct substitute; avoid tomato paste, which is roughly three times as concentrated.
- Water, not stockThe recipe calls for boiling water rather than stock, which keeps it independent of a stock pot. Light chicken or veal stock in its place makes a better sauce and changes nothing else.
- Vegetable cut"A slice" of carrot and turnip is a token aromatic, not a mirepoix; the book gives no thickness, so any small cube will do. The vegetables are strained out and discarded, so uniformity matters only for even cooking.
- Add liquid gradually and off the heatAdd liquid gradually -- The recipe says to add the water and tomato gradually. Add a little at a time, whisking smooth between additions, then return to a simmer.
- YieldRoughly 2 to 2 1/4 cups after straining; the five-minute cooking reduces very little.
Brown sauces built on a browned butter-and-flour roux with a few aromatics and a spoonful of tomato descend from the French sauce espagnole, here reduced to a form a household cook could manage in a quarter of an hour with water instead of a day's stock pot. That compression is characteristic: the classical repertoire stripped to reproducible proportions, printed in a fixed order — fat, flour, seasoning, liquid — so a student could learn one structure and vary it. Tomato appears here as flavouring rather than as the base.