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Chauteaubriand Sauce
Put a small lump of meat glaze into a saucepan with one-half teacupful of white wine and stir it over the fire until melted; then pour in one-half pint of Spanish sauce and let it simmer for twenty minutes. Thicken the sauce with a maitre d'hotel sauce, and serve it.
A short compound sauce that assumes you already have two of the classic French mother preparations on hand. Nearly all the work happens before this recipe begins.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a firm, syrupy jelly. A "small lump" is roughly a tablespoon. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a good glace de viande from a butcher stands in; a stock cube does not, being mostly salt.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of brown roux, stock and mirepoix. Half a pint is one cup. Commercial demi-glace works and is already reduced, so expect the final sauce to be thicker and saltier.
- Half a teacupfulPeriod teacups ran small, about 4 fl oz, so half a teacupful is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, of dry white wine. Anything crisp and unoaked is right; much of the alcohol cooks off during the twenty-minute simmer.
- Maitre d'hotel "sauce"Here it means maitre d'hotel butter: soft butter kneaded with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Two to three tablespoons, cold and in pieces, is enough for this quantity.
- The hingePull the pan off the heat before working in the butter, and swirl rather than boil. Once the butter breaks the sauce turns greasy and will not come back together.
- What the simmer is forTwenty minutes at a bare simmer reduces and clarifies; skim the skin of fat and scum that rises at the edge as it goes. You want a sauce that coats a spoon before the butter goes in.
- Yield and servingMakes a little under a cup after reduction. It is meant for the grilled chateaubriand cut of beef tenderloin, and a little chopped tarragon at the end is traditional.
The dish, the cut and the sauce all take their name from Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, the writer and diplomat of the Napoleonic era; the creation of both steak and sauce is traditionally credited to his chef Montmireil, though the attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented. Oscar Tschirky took charge of the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s, by which time chateaubriand was a familiar grand-hotel showpiece for two, carved at the table. The version later fixed in Escoffier's repertoire is a white wine and shallot reduction let down with brown sauce and mounted with maitre d'hotel butter, though no shallots appear here. The compressed instructions assume a kitchen with espagnole and glace de viande already going, so the recipe is really just the last stage of the work.