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Spanish Sauce
2 tablespoons finely chopped lean raw ham 2 tablespoons chopped celery 2 tablespoons chopped carrot 1 tablespoon chopped onion ¼ cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1⅓ cups Brown Stock 2/3 cup stewed and strained tomatoes Salt and pepper Cook ham and vegetables with butter until butter is well browned; add flour, stock, and tomatoes; cook five minutes, then strain. Season with salt and pepper.
Béchamel Sauce 1½ cups White Stock 1 slice onion 1 slice carrot Bit of bay leaf Sprig of parsley ⅛ teaspoon pepper 6 peppercorns 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1 cup scalded milk ½ teaspoon salt Cook stock twenty minutes with onion, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, and peppercorns, then strain; there should be one cupful. Melt the butter, add flour, and gradually hot stock and milk. Season with salt and pepper.
Yellow Béchamel Sauce To two cups Béchamel Sauce add yolks of three eggs slightly beaten, first diluting eggs with small quantity of hot sauce, then adding gradually to remaining sauce. This prevents the sauce from having a curdled appearance.
A brown roux sauce built on a small mirepoix and raw ham, from the era when a kitchen kept brown stock on hand. It comes together in about twenty minutes.
- The hinge: brown the butter, not just the vegetablesMuch of the colour and flavour of the finished sauce comes from cooking the ham and vegetables until the butter is genuinely browned. Keep the heat moderate; pale butter yields a thin, tomato-tinged gravy instead of a Spanish sauce.
- Butter and flour quantitiesThe butter should read 1/4 cup, matching the 1/4 cup flour for a standard roux. Four tablespoons of each is the intended proportion.
- Lean raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham, closer to prosciutto or speck than to a supermarket boiled ham slice. Two tablespoons of finely diced prosciutto, pancetta, or unsmoked salt pork gives the same salty, fatty base.
- Brown StockThe book's Brown Stock is a long-simmered beef and bone stock, unthickened. A good low-sodium beef stock works; avoid anything already reduced to a glaze.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesIn 1896 this meant canned or fresh tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve to remove seeds and skin. Two-thirds cup of tomato purée or passata is the direct equivalent; tomato paste is far too concentrated.
- StrainingThe vegetables and ham are flavoring only and are discarded. Press firmly on the solids in the strainer to recover the thickened sauce clinging to them.
- Yield and useAbout two cups. The recipe itself gives no yield, serving count, or accompaniments.
Nineteenth-century American and English cookbooks used "Spanish sauce" loosely for various brown sauces, a translation-by-approximation of the French sauce espagnole — which despite its name is one of the classic French mother sauces, a brown roux sauce built on veal or beef stock. The connection to Spain is traditional rather than documented; the usual explanation offered is that Spanish cooks in the French royal kitchens favored a darker, tomato-enriched stock, but the story is repeated far more often than it is evidenced. What is clear is that Fannie Farmer's version is a domestic shortcut: a true espagnole took a day of stock reduction, while this one reaches a similar effect in five minutes of simmering by leaning on browned butter, cured ham, and strained tomato. Its place in the sauce chapter may reflect a habit of teaching one roux technique and then varying the liquid — brown stock here, white stock and milk for the béchamel that follows.