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Sauce Piquante
To make sauce piquante, put a large spoon of sweet butter in a stewpan, slice into it two onions, two carrots, a little thyme, two cloves, two shallots and a bunch of parsley; add, if liked, a clove of garlic. Let them cook until the carrot is soft, then shake in a little flour; let it cook for five minutes more, and add a cup of beef or veal stock and one-half cup of strong vinegar; skim and strain through a sieve. Add salt and pepper when boiling. SAUCE ROBERT Shred down one-half dozen onions and fry them with butter in a small saucepan until they are finely browned; then add a little flour, say a tablespoon, a tablespoon of mushroom catsup, one-half pint of strong stock, pepper, salt and mustard to taste, and a little lemon juice. This is a favorite sauce with some people for both cold and hot meats.
Two related brown sauces of the French repertoire, given in the compressed style of a 1911 household manual that assumed you already had stock on hand. The hinge in both is patience with the onions: rushed, pale onions give a thin, sour sauce, and no amount of straining will fix it.
- Sweet butter"Sweet" means unsalted, not sugared. What "a large spoon" meant is not fixed; it may be a serving spoon rather than a tablespoon, so anywhere from a tablespoon up to about 1½ oz (45 g).
- How long the vegetables need"Until the carrot is soft" is 15-20 minutes over low heat, stirring so nothing browns hard. Sliced thin, the carrot and onion should collapse and sweeten; that sweetness is what balances the vinegar later.
- The flour stageShaking in flour and cooking five minutes makes a blond roux in the fat. Use about a tablespoon for the quantity of liquid given, and keep it moving or it will scorch against the vegetables.
- Vinegar in proportionHalf a cup of "strong vinegar" to one cup of stock is aggressive by current taste, and household vinegars of the period were not standardised to the 5% acidity sold now. Add it in stages and taste, or reduce it separately with the aromatics first and add the stock after.
- Cloves and garlicThe two cloves are whole spice cloves, not garlic cloves; the garlic is listed separately as optional. Straining catches them, but two cloves in a cup of sauce is assertive, so leave them whole rather than crushing.
- Mushroom catsupIn Sauce Robert this is the old English condiment of salted, spiced mushroom liquor, dark and savoury rather than sweet. Bottled mushroom ketchup is still made; failing that, a tablespoon of soy sauce or Worcestershire gives a comparable depth, though neither is the same thing.
- Mustard and lemonAssume dry mustard powder, a teaspoon or less, stirred in off the boil so it does not turn bitter. The lemon juice goes in last, after the sauce is off the heat.
- Half a pint of stockAn American half-pint is one cup. Six onions fried down will absorb it quickly, so keep more stock warm in case the sauce tightens past coating consistency.
- YieldThe piquante makes roughly a cup. Sauce Robert, from half a pint of stock plus six onions cooked down, gives rather more, and it is not strained -- the browned onion is the body of it.
Both of these are old members of the classical French brown-sauce family, and both reached English kitchens long before Butterick printed them. Piquante simply means sharp, and the method here is the standard one: aromatics sweated in butter, a little flour, stock and vinegar, then reduced and strained, a formula Carême and later Escoffier set down in more elaborate terms. Sauce Robert is older still and is generally traced to a cook named Robert working in sixteenth-century France, an attribution repeated for centuries without firm documentation; Rabelais praises a "sauce Robert" in Gargantua, which at least fixes the name in the 1530s. Its defining pair is onion and mustard, and it was classically served with pork. That a general-purpose American sewing-pattern company's cookbook of the 1910s printed both, with the note that Robert suits "both cold and hot meats," shows how thoroughly the French sauce vocabulary had been absorbed into ordinary middle-class household cooking, stripped of its ceremony and reduced to a paragraph apiece.