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Sauce Piquante
2 tablespoons butter or other 2 cloves fat
1 clove of garlic
2 onions
2 tablespoons flour
2 carrots
1 cup beef or veal stock
2 shallots
½ cup vinegar
Thyme
Salt and pepper
1 bunch parsley
Melt butter or other fat, slice into it onions, carrots and shallots. Add a little thyme, minced parsley, cloves and clove of garlic. Let this mixture cook until the carrot is soft, then add flour. Let it cook for five minutes more, and add beef or veal stock and vinegar, skim, and strain through a sieve. Add salt and pepper when boiling.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column setting, so read it as a list of pairs rather than as written. Once untangled it is a classic brown piquante: an aromatic roux-based sauce sharpened with vinegar.
- The garbled ingredient columnRead it as: 2 tablespoons butter or other fat, 1 clove of garlic, 2 onions, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 carrots, 1 cup beef or veal stock, 2 shallots, 1/2 cup vinegar, 2 cloves (the spice), thyme, salt and pepper, 1 bunch parsley. The stray "2 cloves" at the top of the second column belongs with the whole spices, not with the garlic.
- Vinegar to stock ratioHalf a cup of vinegar to one cup of stock is aggressive by modern taste, and home-made cider and wine vinegars of the period were of unstandardised strength, sometimes weaker than today's 5 percent. Start with a quarter cup, reduce, and add more at the end to taste.
- Cook the vegetables properly"Until the carrot is soft" implies a slow sweat rather than a quick fry, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes over medium-low heat. Rushing it gives a pale, raw-tasting result.
- The flourFive minutes of cooking after the flour goes in is the minimum for losing the raw taste. Keep the heat moderate and stir, and let the roux take on a nut-brown colour before the liquid goes in.
- Skim and strainSkimming means lifting the fat and scum from the surface once it comes to a simmer, before straining. Press the vegetables firmly against the sieve to extract the liquid, then discard them.
- Season at the endThe instruction to salt when boiling is sensible if the sauce tightens at all during cooking; salting early and then reducing easily overshoots.
- YieldSomewhere between one and one and a half cups after straining, depending on how much reduces away, enough for four to six servings alongside grilled or roasted meat, tongue, or leftover boiled beef.
Sauce piquante is one of the standard brown derivative sauces of French cooking, close in pattern to sauce Robert: aromatics sweated in fat, thickened with flour, moistened with stock, and sharpened with vinegar. Its traditional job was to make plain or reheated meat interesting, and it commonly appears in nineteenth-century household books near instructions for using cold joints. This version is a domesticated one, using a fresh mirepoix and a plain flour thickening rather than the classical route of adding vinegar and shallots to a ready-made espagnole -- a shortcut often found in household books of the period, which did not assume a larder of prepared mother sauces. The name carries the sense of "sharp" or "pungent", and the vinegar is the whole point of the thing.