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Colbert Sauce
Put two ounces of meat-glaze into a saucepan over the fire with one-half teacupful of stock; stir it until it has melted, then pour in one pint of the same stock and stir in slowly one ounce of butter broken into small pieces. When on the point of boiling, strain the sauce, squeeze in the juice of a lemon or two, add one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and serve.
A short butter-finished sauce built on meat glaze, in the style Oscar's kitchen would have kept ready at the range. The whole thing lives or dies on temperature control at the end.
- Never let it boil after the butter goes inThe instruction "when on the point of boiling" is the hinge. Once butter is whisked into a glaze-based sauce, a true boil breaks the emulsion and you get a greasy film instead of gloss. Keep it just below a simmer and pull it off the heat to finish.
- Meat-glazeThis is glace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a firm, sliceable jelly. Two ounces is roughly four tablespoons (about a quarter cup) of the solid glaze. Commercial demi-glace or veal glace concentrate stands in; if you use a paste-style bouillon concentrate, cut the quantity sharply, since those are far saltier than reduced stock.
- TeacupfulA period teacup is smaller than a modern mug, and was reckoned variously at about four to six ounces, so half a teacupful is somewhere around a quarter to a third of a cup. It is only there to dissolve the glaze, so the exact figure does not matter.
- StockUse the same brown veal or beef stock the glaze came from, unsalted or lightly salted. Total liquid is about one pint plus the melting liquid, thickened only by the glaze and butter, so expect a thin, intensely savoury sauce rather than a coating one.
- Strain before, not after, if you canStraining a butter-mounted sauce through a fine sieve risks knocking the emulsion apart and dropping the temperature. It is easier to strain the melted glaze and stock, then whisk in the butter off direct heat.
- Lemon"A lemon or two" is a wide range for a pint of sauce. Start with the juice of one, taste, and add more only if the glaze is very concentrated and needs cutting.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work, but chop it just before adding and stir it in off the heat so it stays green and does not stew.
- Yield and servingAbout two and a half cups, enough for six to eight portions. Serve it hot with grilled or fried fish, poached eggs, or plain grilled meat and poultry; it will not hold long, so make it last.
Colbert is one of the classical French sauces named for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though as with most such attributions the origin of the name is undocumented, and there is nothing to connect it to anyone in Colbert's own kitchen. In the codified repertoire it usually appears as beurre Colbert, a maitre d'hotel butter with meat glaze and tarragon worked into it, dropped onto grilled fish; the version here is the same idea loosened into a pouring sauce with stock. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a fair picture of how a large American hotel kitchen of the 1890s worked, where a dozen different sauces might be pulled together in minutes, which is exactly what a la carte service at the Waldorf demanded.