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Champagne Sauce
Place two cloves, half a dozen whole peppers and one-half tablespoonful of powdered sugar in a saucepan with a brimming glassful of champagne. Set it on the fire and reduce it for five minutes; then moisten with three-quarters of a pint of Spanish sauce and cook for fifteen minutes longer. Strain through a fine strainer, and serve.
A short reduction sauce that depends entirely on the brown sauce beneath it. Everything here hinges on having a real sauce espagnole ready before you open the wine.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce: a dark roux moistened with brown veal or beef stock, with mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Oscar assumed a stockpot standing in the kitchen. A well-reduced homemade brown stock thickened lightly with a brown roux is the nearest practical substitute; commercial demi-glace concentrate works but is saltier, so hold back on seasoning.
- A brimming glassfulGenuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century cookbooks generally reckoned a wineglassful at about 2 fluid ounces, though a brimming champagne glass in a hotel kitchen would hold more; take it as somewhere between a quarter and a half cup. Err on the larger side, since five minutes of reduction removes much of the volume anyway.
- Three-quarters of a pintTwelve fluid ounces, or a cup and a half. Finished yield is a little over a cup after reduction and straining, enough for four to six portions.
- Whole peppersWhole black peppercorns, not chilies. Six is right for this volume; they perfume the reduction without making the sauce hot, and they come out at the straining stage.
- The champagneUse a dry sparkling wine, brut rather than demi-sec. The half tablespoon of powdered sugar is there to round the acid of the wine, and a sweet wine plus sugar will push the sauce cloying. There is no need for vintage champagne; the bubbles are gone within seconds of hitting the pan.
- Reducing for five minutesKeep the wine at a lively simmer, not a rolling boil, and take it to about a third of its volume, syrupy and just coating the pan bottom. Time is less reliable than appearance here, since pan width changes everything.
- The second cookingFifteen minutes at a bare simmer, skimming any skin or fat that rises to the side of the pan. This is the step that marries the wine to the stock; rushing it leaves the sauce tasting of raw alcohol.
- ServingSuits poultry, ham, or sweetbreads; being built on a brown sauce, it sits less naturally with fish than the fumet-based champagne sauces do. Strain, then, if you like, finish off the heat with a knob of cold butter swirled in for gloss -- though the recipe itself stops at the strainer.
Sauces named for a wine were a standard part of the classical French repertoire that Oscar Tschirky's kitchens worked in, and they follow one formula: reduce the wine hard with aromatics, then let a well-made mother sauce carry it. That the mother sauce here is simply called "Spanish sauce" tells you something about the book's audience — The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) was written for American households and cooks who were meant to recognize espagnole by its English name and, in principle, to have some standing by. The technique is thrifty in a way the name conceals, since the sauce needs only a glassful.