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D'Uxelles Sauce
Reduce one-half pint of Madeira sauce with one-half wineglassful of white wine; add to it a dozen very finely-chopped mushrooms, two shallots also chopped up and browned in a very little butter for five minutes, and one-half ounce of chopped cooked beef tongue. Boil again for five minutes, and then serve.
A short brown-sauce derivative from the Waldorf's saucier station, written for a kitchen that already had a stockpot of Madeira sauce standing by. The work is in the base, not in the finishing.
- Madeira sauceThis is espagnole or a well-reduced brown veal stock finished with Madeira, not Madeira poured into gravy. If you are not making it from scratch, reduce 2 cups of strong unsalted brown stock to about 1 cup and add 2 tablespoons of dry Madeira.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is 1 cup. A wineglassful in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so half a glass is roughly 1 fluid ounce, or 2 tablespoons.
- A dozen mushroomsGenuinely ambiguous. Probably small white button caps, which would put a dozen somewhere in the range of 4 to 8 ounces trimmed. Chop them fine, not to a paste.
- The hinge: drive off the waterRaw chopped mushrooms carry a great deal of liquid, and adding them straight to a reduced sauce will thin it back out. Sweat them in the shallot butter until they stop steaming and begin to squeak and colour, then add them.
- ShallotsFive minutes in "a very little butter" means softened and lightly gold. Scorched shallot turns the whole sauce bitter and cannot be corrected.
- Beef tongueHalf an ounce is a garnish, not a flavour base -- cooked, cooled, and cut in fine dice. Tongue is now a special-order item in many places; a comparable amount of finely diced prosciutto or good boiled ham does the same job.
- Final boilFive minutes at a bare simmer is enough to marry it. A hard boil after the wine goes in will break the gloss and flatten the Madeira.
- YieldSomething over a cup of finished sauce, enough for about four portions. It belongs with grilled or roasted veal, beef and poultry, or spooned over stuffed vegetables.
The name points to the Chalon du Ble family, marquis d'Uxelles -- sources differ over whether the dish honours Louis or his son Nicolas -- whose household cook is traditionally said to have been Francois Pierre La Varenne; the attribution is repeated everywhere in the culinary literature but rests on custom rather than documentation. What survives of the name is duxelles, the fine dry hash of mushroom and shallot that underpins a great deal of classical garnishing, and the brown sauce built on it. Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf kitchen as it worked in the 1890s, when a New York hotel brigade cooked largely out of the French repertoire, and sauces of this kind were assembled to order from mother sauces already reducing on the stove. The scrap of tongue is a period touch: a pressed or boiled tongue was a common hotel larder item, and its dice turn up in garnishes of this sort as much for colour as for flavour.