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Claret or Bordelaise Sauce
If this is to be made for roasted meat, use the fat in the pan in which the meat was roasted or baked. To each two tablespoons of this, allow one tablespoon of browned flour and one-half pint of brown stock. Put the flour in the pan, mix with fat, then add the stock all at once. Add one teaspoon of caramel, season with onion juice, salt and pepper. Boil one minute, pour in a wine-glass of claret, heat for one-half minute more and serve.
A pan sauce built on roast drippings, thickened with browned flour and finished with red wine. It comes together in under five minutes, so have everything measured before the roast leaves the oven.
- The measurements in modern termsHalf a pint of brown stock is one cup. A wine-glass in period American cookbooks is generally reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, or a quarter cup, though the term is loose and some writers meant twice that. Start with 2 ounces and taste.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a low oven until it smells nutty and turns the colour of light sand. Browning reduces its thickening power, so plain flour used in the same quantity would give a somewhat thicker sauce.
- Caramel means colouring, not confectionA teaspoon of "caramel" here is burnt-sugar colouring, sugar cooked black and let down with water, kept in a bottle for darkening gravies. It contributes bitterness and colour rather than sweetness. Modern gravy browning does the same job, or leave it out and accept a paler sauce.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and squeeze the pulp through a sieve or cloth. Roughly a teaspoon gives the flavour without any texture; the point of using juice is a smooth sauce.
- The hinge: add the stock all at onceThe recipe is specific that the stock goes in in a single go; whisked hard as it goes in, this keeps the browned flour from lumping. Adding liquid slowly without constant stirring is what sets flour into knots.
- Timing on the wineHalf a minute barely warms the claret and leaves an obvious raw-alcohol edge. Two to three minutes at a bare simmer rounds it off without losing the fruit; a full boil dulls it.
- What claret isThe English term for red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red will do the same work here — avoid anything oaky, sweet, or labelled cooking wine, which is salted.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter of finished sauce, enough for roughly four servings of roast beef or lamb. Scale the fat, flour and stock together in the same proportions if you need more.
"Claret" is the old English name for the red wines of Bordeaux, from the medieval French clairet, a lighter-coloured red once shipped in quantity to England; by the nineteenth century it had become the ordinary British and American word for red Bordeaux and, loosely, for any dry red. The Butterick book pairs the name with "Bordelaise" in a single heading. Classic French sauce bordelaise is a more elaborate affair, built on shallots reduced in red wine, a demi-glace, and traditionally finished with poached beef marrow; what appears here is the American household version, made in the roasting pan from the fat already there. The Butterick Publishing Company was a dress-pattern firm, and its cookbook was aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its patterns, assuming the fat left in the roasting pan and the browned flour kept ready in a jar.