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Jardiniere Sauce
Cut three peeled carrots into slices one-quarter of an inch thick, and with a small long and round vegetable-cutter, cut each slice into as many pieces as possible. Prepare some turnips in the same way, put them with the carrots into a saucepan with twenty peeled button onions, one tablespoonful of butter and one teaspoonful of sugar, and fry over a moderate fire for from ten to fifteen minutes; then pour in one and one-half breakfast cupful of broth and let it simmer gently at the side of the fire until the vegetables are tender; then boil it up to reduce the moisture a little and skim off all the fat. Pour three-fourths of a pint of brown sauce into another saucepan with one and one-half teacupfuls of broth and boil it quickly until thick and creamy; then put in with it some pieces of cauliflower, seven or eight heads of asparagus, two tablespoonfuls of green peas, one tablespoonful of string beans and the prepared vegetables, and let all boil gently for fifteen or twenty minutes. Season with a small quantity each of salt and sugar, move it off fhe fire, put in one table-spoonful of butter and stir it until it is dissolved. The sauce is then ready for serving. A bunch of parsley and a bay leaf will improve the flavor.
This is a garnish sauce in the old French sense: a brown sauce carrying a load of neatly cut vegetables, meant to be spooned over a roast or braised joint rather than served as a vegetable dish. The bulk of the work is knife work, and the one thing to change is the final boil.
- The hinge: do not boil the green vegetablesFifteen to twenty minutes of simmering will turn asparagus tips, peas and beans olive-grey and mushy. Blanch them separately until barely tender, hold them in cold water, and stir them into the finished sauce only to heat through, a minute or two before serving.
- "Brown sauce"In a hotel kitchen of this period this would most likely have been espagnole: a brown sauce built on brown roux and veal or beef stock, reduced. Three-fourths of a pint is 1 1/2 cups. A good demi-glace, or a well-reduced brown stock lightly thickened, stands in for it; commercial gravy will not.
- Cup measuresThe book does not define its cups. By general period usage a breakfast cupful runs to something like 8 to 10 fl oz and a teacupful about 6 oz, which would put 1 1/2 breakfast cupfuls of broth on the vegetables and something under a cup on the sauce. Both figures are elastic judge by consistency, which should end up coating a spoon.
- The vegetable cutterThe "small long and round vegetable-cutter" is most likely a small round column cutter, used to punch even cylinders from a quarter-inch slice. Failing that, dice the carrot and turnip evenly to about 1/3 inch so they cook at one rate.
- Glazing the rootsThe butter, sugar and ten to fifteen minutes over "a moderate fire" are a glaze, not a browning — keep the heat at a bare sizzle so the carrots, turnips and onions take on shine and sweetness without colouring hard.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range that meant the cooler edge of the plate: a bare simmer with an occasional bubble. On a modern hob, the lowest setting with the lid ajar.
- Button onionsTwenty peeled pearl or small pickling onions. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save considerable time; if using fresh, a brief blanch makes them slip out of their skins.
- AromaticsThe parsley bunch and bay leaf go in with the broth and come out before serving — tie them together so they are easy to fish out.
- YieldRoughly a quart of finished sauce, enough to garnish a roast or braised joint for eight to ten. It is finished off the heat with butter, so it will not hold well or reheat cleanly — make it to serve.
Jardinière "gardener's style" is one of the fixed garnishes of nineteenth-century French cookery, and its definition is the cut: root vegetables trimmed to matching batons, cylinders or pearls so that a plate of them looks deliberate. Carême-era kitchens had a whole vocabulary of these garnishes, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel in the 1890s, in charge of the dining rooms and service, they were the common currency of American hotel dining, where a menu written in French signalled seriousness.