Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Matelote Sauce
Matelote Sauce
Put some slices of onion into a stewpan with a lump of butter, and fry them until browned; then remove them, leaving the butter in the stewpan. Pour in with the butter one and one-half pints of wine and stock, mixed in equal quantities (either red or white wine can be used), and season to taste with salt and pepper. Boil the sauce until it is reduced to one-third its original quantity, then put in some cooked mushrooms, and the onions, and serve it.
A classic wine-and-stock reduction for fish, built the old way: fry the aromatics, discard them into the pot at the end, and let the liquid do the work. A few points on quantities and technique.
- QuantitiesOne and one-half pints is 3 cups, so 1½ cups wine to 1½ cups stock. Reduced to one-third you finish with about 1 cup of sauce.
- What stock to useMatelote is a freshwater-fish preparation, so a fish stock is the likely base; the wine choice follows the fish and the region. Red wine is the usual pairing in matelotes of eel and carp, though the recipe here allows either red or white.
- "A lump of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons. It is there to brown the onion and to carry that flavor into the reduction, not to thicken the sauce.
- Reducing with wineLet the wine boil hard enough to cook off the raw alcohol early. A wide pan and a steady boil will reduce the liquid faster than a bare simmer.
- Season at the end, not the startThe recipe says to season before reducing. Salt concentrates threefold as the liquid falls, so season lightly at first and correct once the sauce is at volume.
- BodyAs written this is an unthickened reduction and will be thin by modern expectation. Classic versions of matelote sauce are thickened, with a fish velouté or brown sauce as part of the liquid or a finish of kneaded butter; a small piece of cold butter whisked in off the heat gives it gloss.
- The mushrooms and onionsBoth go in only at the end, already cooked, to warm through. Boiling them in the reduction muddies the sauce and turns the onion slices to threads.
Matelote takes its name from the French matelot, sailor: a freshwater fish stew of the river towns, made with whatever the nets brought up, cooked in wine with onions and mushrooms, and traditionally associated with eel. In time matelote was absorbed into the codified French repertoire that governed the grand hotel kitchen, and the stew's cooking liquid had been detached and catalogued as a sauce in its own right, to be spooned over fish that had never seen a riverbank.