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Montebello Garnish
For this, truffles with tomato and bearnaise sauce are prepared as follows: Pour one pint of tomato sauce in a saucepan and add an equal quantity of Bearnaise sauce and three sliced truffles; place the saucepan in the bain-marie, warm up without boiling, and it is ready for use.
This is a compound sauce in the classical French manner rather than a dish in itself at the Waldorf it would have been spooned over or around grilled and roasted meats. The whole thing hinges on temperature.
- The one rule: no boilingBéarnaise is an egg-yolk-and-butter emulsion and it will break somewhere above about 160F. Warming it with tomato sauce over direct heat risks curdling the mixture; keep the water in the bath below a simmer and stir.
- Bain-marieA saucepan set in a larger pan of hot water, or a heatproof bowl over a pan. Large professional kitchens of Oscar's day kept a water bath at the side of the range in which sauces were held at service temperature.
- Tomato sauce means the classical oneNot a pasta sauce. The classical French sauce tomate is built on salt pork, mirepoix, stock and a roux, cooked down and strained — closer to a smooth tomato velouté than to marinara. A modern passata reduced with a little stock and butter is the nearest quick stand-in.
- TrufflesThe recipe does not specify a variety; in season this would most likely have meant fresh black truffle, with tinned truffle the rest of the year. Tinned or jarred truffles are still sold and behave the way the recipe expects; truffle oil is a different product and will dominate the sauce rather than perfume it.
- Proportions and yieldEqual parts by volume, one pint each, giving roughly a quart — a quantity suited to restaurant service rather than a single household dish. Halving or quartering the quantity changes nothing but the arithmetic.
- Season at the endBoth parent sauces are already salted and the béarnaise carries vinegar and tarragon, so taste only once they are combined and warm. A little more salt is usually all it wants.
- ServingThe recipe does not say what it accompanies; a sauce of this type would suit grilled beef, tournedos, chateaubriand or sweetbreads. Make it close to service; reheating is likely to separate it.
Nineteenth-century French kitchens named garnishes after people, places and battles, and the list ran to hundreds — a cook reading "Montebello" on a menu was meant to know at once what would arrive on the plate. Montebello is a village in Lombardy, the site of Napoleonic and Second Italian War of Independence engagements, and the ducal title granted to Marshal Lannes; garnishes of this sort are generally traced to that commemorative habit rather than to any single documented chef. The tomato-and-béarnaise combination at the heart of it is what French practice otherwise calls sauce Choron, and Oscar's version simply adds sliced truffle to lift it into Waldorf territory. That a hotel kitchen kept both parent sauces standing in the bain-marie, ready to be married to order, says a good deal about how such a restaurant worked: the elaborate plate was assembled in seconds from components that had taken all morning.