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Champagne Sauce
Simmer two cups of brown sauce until reduced to one and one-half cup. Add one-half cup of champagne and a tablespoon of sugar. Serve with ham.
Three lines and no timings, which assumes you already have a pot of brown sauce standing by. The whole dish hinges on that base and on when the wine goes in.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this period this means a classic espagnole or a simple brown roux sauce built on browned flour, mirepoix and brown stock, simmered and strained. A good reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly with a brown roux will stand in; canned gravy will not, since the reduction concentrates whatever faults it has.
- The reductionTwo cups down to one and a half is a modest 25 percent, roughly 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer in a wide pan. Skim the skin that forms at the edge rather than stirring it back in; it is mostly fat and scum and will muddy the finished sauce.
- Add the wine off the boilThe recipe does not say when to add it, but champagne stirred into a hard-boiling sauce will blow off much of its aroma and leave mostly acidity. Take the pan to a bare tremble, add the half cup, and hold it there a minute or two at most before serving.
- Which champagneThe recipe does not say which style, and the tablespoon of sugar suggests a dry wine was in mind, though sweeter sec and demi-sec champagnes were common at the time. If you use an off-dry sparkling wine, cut the sugar to a teaspoon and taste, or the sauce turns cloying against the salt of the ham.
- The sugar is structuralThe sugar -- A tablespoon in this quantity reads as much as a balance against the wine's acid and the ham's cure as it does as straight sweetening. Add it with the wine and let it dissolve rather than caramelizing it separately.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings spooned over sliced baked or braised ham. Season at the very end; the reduction will have concentrated the salt already in the stock.
Sauces named for a wine were a fixture of the late nineteenth-century French repertoire that American cookbooks were busy domesticating, and champagne sauce belongs to that family alongside madeira, port and sherry sauces built on the same espagnole base. The pairing with ham is the point: a cured, salty, faintly sweet meat asks for something acidic and sweet in return, which is the same logic behind ham with cider, with Madeira, or with pineapple. The Butterick Cook Book came out of a pattern and magazine publisher aimed squarely at middle-class American housewives, and its sauce chapter reflects what is often said to have been the era's assumption that a well-run kitchen kept a brown sauce going as a matter of course, to be turned into a dozen different named sauces with a splash of this or that.