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Chateaubriand Sauce
One pint of Spanish sauce; one gill of sherry; three tablespoons of butter; one of lemon juice; one teaspoon of minced parsley; one saltspoon of salt and a pinch or two of pepper. Thoroughly whip the butter, lemon juice, salt and pepper together and add the parsley. When wanted, add all this to the Spanish sauce, made hot, stir for a moment or so and serve.
A compound-butter finish stirred into a brown mother sauce. The recipe is sound, but it leaves one ingredient stranded and assumes you already have a quart-scale stock operation running.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce: brown roux moistened with brown veal stock and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A good reduced demi-glace or a well-made brown stock sauce stands in.
- A gill of sherryHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than cooking sherry, which is salted.
- The sherry is never given a momentThe instructions account for every ingredient except the wine. Standard practice is to reduce the sherry by about half in a separate pan, then add the pint of espagnole and bring it up hot; adding raw sherry at the end leaves the sauce thin and boozy.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. With a demi-glace already seasoned and possibly reduced, taste before adding it at all.
- Do not let it boil after the butter goes inDo not let it boil hard after the butter goes in -- a roux-thickened brown sauce is fairly forgiving, but prolonged boiling can throw the butter out as oil. Stir until just melted and serve at once, as the recipe directs.
- Whip the butter properlySoftened, not melted, beaten until pale and light before the lemon juice goes in a little at a time. It can be made hours ahead and held cold, then dropped into the hot sauce at service.
- YieldNearer a pint and a quarter to a pint and a half, depending on how far the sherry is reduced.
The sauce takes its name from the thick cut of beef tenderloin called a chateaubriand, itself named for the writer and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand; the invention is traditionally credited to his chef, Montmireil, though the attribution rests on nineteenth-century kitchen lore rather than documents. Escoffier's version is a white-wine and shallot reduction finished with maître d'hôtel butter — butter, parsley, and lemon — plus chopped tarragon, which is essentially the compound butter used here, so the name had already settled into a general formula of brown sauce plus wine plus a lemony compound butter by the time this Butterick book appeared. Its presence in an American household manual of the period says a good deal about the ambitions of the middle-class table: the book expects a cook who has a pint of properly made espagnole standing by.