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Bordelaise Sauce
Chop fine four shallots, boil them for a few minutes, then strain off the water and put them into a saucepan with one-half pint of white wine. Boil the wine for twenty minutes; then add one pint of Spanish sauce, a small quantity of chopped parsley and pepper. Let the sauce simmer gently by the edge of the fire for twenty minutes longer, then boil it up and serve at once.
A short derivative sauce that depends almost entirely on the quality of the brown sauce underneath it. Read the notes on Spanish sauce first, since that is the part that takes the time.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce: a brown roux moistened with brown veal or beef stock, with mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A pint of it is the bulk of this recipe. A good reduced brown stock or a well-made demi-glace stands in for it acceptably; a jarred gravy does not.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint of wine is one cup, a pint of Spanish sauce is two cups. The finished sauce will be somewhat under two cups after reduction, which would serve roughly four to six.
- Blanching the shallotsBoiling and draining the chopped shallots before they meet the wine takes off their raw sharpness. It is a step worth keeping, and only takes two or three minutes.
- Reducing the wineTwenty minutes at a steady boil should take a cup of white wine down to a few spoonfuls of syrupy glaze. Judge it by volume, not the clock, and use a wide pan so it moves along.
- "By the edge of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler margin of the top plate, where a pan holds a bare tremble. On a gas or electric hob that is the lowest setting, or a heat diffuser. The point is to reduce and skim without catching the flour in the espagnole on the pan bottom.
- Skim as it simmersDuring the second twenty minutes fat and scum will collect at one side of the pan. Draw it off with a spoon. This is what separates a clear, glossy sauce from a muddy one.
- FinishingOscar seasons only with pepper and parsley, which suggests the espagnole was already salted. Taste before serving. A knob of cold butter swirled in off the heat at the last moment is a common modern finish and does no violence to the recipe.
Bordelaise takes its name from Bordeaux and, in most French practice, is built on red wine with a bone-marrow garnish poached and slipped in at the end. Oscar's version uses white, which is not an error so much as a reflection of nineteenth-century usage: white-wine versions of the sauce were in circulation, generally intended for fish and lighter meats, though in the Guide Culinaire the white-wine relative appears under a different name rather than as a second bordelaise. What is unmistakably of its period is the assumption running underneath the recipe, that a pint of sauce espagnole is simply available. In a hotel kitchen the size of the Waldorf's, brown sauce was presumably kept going in quantity and the sauciers spent their days spinning small sauces off it. The recipe is four lines long because the hard work had been done hours earlier by somebody else.