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Madeira Sauce
Mix together one small glassful of mushroom liquor and a pint of Espagnole sauce and a small glass of Madeira wine; add a bouquet garnished and a small teaspoonful of red pepper, carefully remove all fat and cook for half an hour, which will leave the sauce in rather a liquid consistency, when it should be strained and is ready for use when needed.
A classical derivative sauce that assumes you already have a pot of Espagnole on the stove — as the Waldorf kitchen did. The whole dish stands or falls on the quality of that base.
- Espagnole firstThere is no shortcut hidden in this recipe: it is a finishing of brown sauce, not a sauce in itself. Use a proper Espagnole (brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix, tomato) or a good reduced veal demi-glace; a thin commercial gravy will produce something thin and salty.
- "A small glassful"In a hotel kitchen of this period a wine glass ran roughly 2 fluid ounces, so read both the mushroom liquor and the Madeira as about 1/4 cup each. The measure is genuinely loose and the sauce tolerates it — err low on the Madeira and correct at the end.
- Mushroom liquorThe strained cooking or canning liquid from mushrooms, saved as a matter of course when a kitchen turned out mushrooms daily. Simmer 4 oz of sliced mushrooms in a little water or stock for ten minutes and strain, or use the liquid from a tin of mushrooms.
- "Bouquet garnished"A garbled rendering of bouquet garni — parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string or bundled in a leek leaf. Tie it so it can be lifted out before straining.
- Red pepperThis means cayenne, not paprika or chilli flakes. A small teaspoonful in a pint is aggressive by current taste; start with 1/8 teaspoon and build, since the sauce concentrates as it cooks.
- Skimming matters"Carefully remove all fat" is the instruction that separates a glossy sauce from a greasy one. Set the pan half off the burner so the simmer pushes fat and scum to the cool side, and skim repeatedly across the half hour.
- ConsistencyThirty minutes at a bare simmer leaves it deliberately loose — it was meant to nap meat, not coat it like gravy. If it seems watery, reduce further rather than adding starch.
- Which MadeiraA dry Sercial or medium Verdelho suits savoury work; Bual and Malmsey are sweet and will push the sauce toward dessert. Some cooks hold back a spoonful of the wine to stir in off the heat, which keeps the aroma the long simmer drives off.
- YieldSomething over a pint once the mushroom liquor and Madeira go in, and the recipe says it stays deliberately liquid rather than reducing far -- enough to sauce six servings of beef, tongue, ham or game.
Madeira sauce is one of the standard brown derivatives codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking, where a single mother sauce — Espagnole, simmered for hours from browned bones and mirepoix — was split off through the service into dozens of named finishes. Oscar Tschirky's book records the working shorthand of exactly that system: the recipe assumes a stockpot and a saucier and gives you only the last five minutes of the job. The wine itself had long been a fixture of American larders, since fortified Madeira survived the sea crossing and the warehouse better than table wine and was drunk in quantity in the colonies and early republic; by the Waldorf's era it read as both familiar and formal. The name is simply the island, and the sauce is generally traced to the same French repertoire that gave us sauce Périgueux and sauce chasseur — a base plus one defining aromatic.