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Brown Sauce
Peel and cut eight or ten large onions into halves and put them in the bottom of a stewpan with one-fourth pound of butter, put one pound of slices of lean ham on the top of them, then eight pounds of leg of beef and veal, also cut into slices. Place the stewpan over a quick fire and fry the contents, keeping the onions at the bottom. When the bottom of the stewpan is covered with a light brown glaze, prick the meat with a fork, remove the stewpan from the fire, deaden it with ashes, place the stewpan again over it and let it stand for half an hour longer, stirring twice during that time. Pour into the stewpan ten quarts of water, add three turnips, two carrots, two blades of mace, and a large bunch of sweet herbs. When boiling move the stewpan to the side of the fire, season the contents with pepper and salt and keep it simmering gently for two hours, skimming off the fat and adding a little cold water now and then to keep it the same quantity. Skim the liquor, thicken it with roux diluted with hot water, and pass it through a fine hair-sieve into a basin. It is then ready for use.
This is hotel-scale espagnole — a brown mother sauce built on eight pounds of meat and ten quarts of water. Everything here works in a home kitchen if you divide by four or five and understand what the fire directions mean.
- The hinge: the glazeThe whole flavour of the sauce is the fond, the brown film that forms on the pan bottom as the onions and meat sear. It must be deep brown and dry but never black; once it burns the sauce is bitter and nothing recovers it. Keep the onions underneath as a buffer, as directed.
- "Deaden it with ashes"On a coal range you dulled the fire by raking ashes over it. On a modern stove this is simply the drop from high heat to the lowest setting for the half-hour stage.
- "Quick fire"High heat — the equivalent of a hot burner under a heavy pan, hot enough to sear and glaze rather than stew. Use the widest, heaviest pot you own so the meat browns instead of releasing water.
- Scaling downA quarter batch is 2 lb mixed beef shin and veal, 4 oz ham, 2 large onions, 1 oz butter, and about 2.5 quarts water. Even that yields close to two quarts of finished sauce.
- Two hours is shortTwo hours suits a kitchen that reduced and re-boiled its sauces all day. For a single batch, four to five hours of gentle simmering extracts far more gelatine and gives the body the sauce needs. Never let it reach a rolling boil, or the fat emulsifies and the sauce clouds.
- Skimming and topping upThe instruction to add cold water now and then is not padding — cold water drives fat and scum to the surface where you can lift it off. Skim patiently; unskimmed brown sauce tastes greasy no matter how well made.
- The rouxA brown roux, cooked to the colour of a hazelnut shell, whisked into hot water and then into the simmering liquor. Roughly 3 tablespoons each of butter and flour per quart of stock gives a light coating consistency.
- StrainingA hair sieve was fine horsehair mesh; a fine chinois or a conical strainer lined with damp muslin does the same work. Press nothing through — let it drip, or the sauce turns muddy.
- Yield and keepingThe cook is told to top the pot up so as to keep it the same quantity, so the full recipe finishes near the ten quarts it started with, less straining losses. Cooled, it sets to a firm jelly; it holds three or four days refrigerated and freezes well in small portions, which is how a home cook should treat it — as a base for pan sauces, braises and stews rather than something made to order.
Brown sauce here is sauce espagnole, one of the foundation sauces codified in early nineteenth-century French practice and generally traced to Antonin Carême's arrangement of the mother sauces; the Spanish name is usually explained, traditionally rather than documentably, by the Spanish ham once used in it — note that Oscar's version still carries a pound of lean ham. Its presence in a book from the Waldorf reflects how a large hotel kitchen actually ran: a saucier kept a standing supply of brown sauce, made in ten-quart lots from cheap shin and leg meat, and the "made dishes" on the menu were finishings of it rather than sauces built from scratch. Oscar Tschirky, who came to the Waldorf in 1893 as maître d'hôtel, was not himself the chef, and recipes like this one read as records of the house system he oversaw — a base to be drawn on all day, which is why the recipe ends not with a dish but with the flat note that it is ready for use.