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Chaudfroid Game Sauce
Boil one and a half pints of Spanish sauce with three-quarters of a breakfast cupful of essence of any game. When stiffly reduced, mix with the sauce two tablespoonfuls of brown aspic jelly cut into small pieces, stir the sauce until the jelly is dissolved, then strain it through a silk sieve, and it is ready for serving.
A classic coating sauce: reduced espagnole enriched with game essence and set with aspic so it will cling to cold birds. The whole point is the consistency at which it is applied.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole — brown stock thickened with a brown roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato, then long-simmered and skimmed. A well-reduced brown veal stock with a light roux binding will stand in; jarred "demi-glace" concentrates are usually too salty once this sauce is reduced further.
- Essence of gameGame stock reduced hard until it is intensely flavoured and slightly syrupy — the trimmings, bones and carcasses of whatever bird or venison the sauce will coat. Make it unsalted, since reduction concentrates everything.
- Breakfast cupfulLarger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fl oz. Three-quarters of one is roughly 6 to 7 fl oz, and the quantity is not critical in a sauce that will be reduced anyway.
- Brown aspic jellyA clarified, well-gelled brown stock. Two tablespoons of firm aspic in the reduced sauce is a light set — enough to make the sauce cling and hold a sheen, not enough to make it rubbery. If your stock is not gelatinous, a little bloomed powdered gelatine will serve, though aspic strengths vary too much to give an exact equivalent.
- The hinge: coating temperatureChaud-froid is applied warm enough to flow and cool enough to set on contact. Strain it, then stir over ice until it thickens to the point where it coats the back of a spoon and just begins to hold a line. Too warm and it slides off the bird; too cool and it goes lumpy and has to be rewarmed and started again.
- Silk sieveA tammy cloth or fine silk was used to catch every speck. A fine chinois lined with a double layer of damp muslin does the same job, and the strained sauce should be skimmed of any surface fat before use.
- Reduction"Stiffly reduced" means down to a thick, glossy sauce, with regular skimming; how far and how long depends on the pan and the heat.
- Yield and useRoughly a pint of finished sauce. Work in two or three thin coats on the bird set on a rack over a tray, chilling between each, and reuse what drips into the tray after straining.
Chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold" — is a sauce made hot and served cold, the backbone of the nineteenth-century cold buffet and of the elaborate pièces montées that made a hotel's reputation. The brown version here is the game counterpart to the white chaud-froid of velouté and cream used on chicken and fish, and the technique is generally traced to the classical French kitchen of Carême and codified later by Escoffier's generation. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893, was maître d'hôtel rather than chef, and his 1896 book largely records the working repertoire of the hotel's kitchen: a sauce like this presumes a brigade with espagnole, game essence and clarified aspic already standing ready, which is why the instructions are three sentences long. Cold decorated game went out with the ornamental buffet, but the sauce survives in charcuterie and in the glazing of pâtés and galantines.