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Papillote Sauce
Chop fine two onions, put them into a stewpan, with one-half ounce of scraped fat of bacon, and stir over the fire for five minutes; then pour in one pint of brown sauce. When boiling put in with the sauce one tablespoonful of chopped parsley and mushrooms, a small quantity of scraped garlic, a lump of sugar, a little nutmeg, and pepper and salt to taste. Stir the sauce and boil it till reduced to a creamy thickness; then take it off the fire and leave it till cold. This sauce is generally used for cutlets Maintenon.
A thick, cold duxelles-style coating sauce, not a pouring sauce. Everything about the method is aimed at getting it stiff enough to cling to a cutlet inside a paper case.
- The hinge: reduce it until it is stiff, then chill"Creamy thickness" here means spreadable, not pourable. Cooked inside paper, a loose sauce runs off the meat and steams the parcel instead of glazing it; reduce well past pouring consistency and let it set cold before using.
- Brown sauceIn this period's hotel usage, effectively espagnole: a brown roux-based stock sauce. A good reduced demi-glace or a strong homemade brown veal stock sauce is the modern stand-in. Canned gravy will be too salty once reduced.
- Scraped fat of baconThe fat scraped with a knife blade into a paste so it melts instantly. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon; a tablespoon of finely chopped bacon fat or lard does the same job.
- QuantitiesOne pint is two cups. "One tablespoonful of chopped parsley and mushrooms" is ambiguous: it may mean a tablespoon of each, or a tablespoon of the two together. A lump of sugar is about a teaspoon. The nutmeg should be a scrape, not a pinch.
- MushroomsChop them fine and let them cook in the sauce long enough to give up their water, or the sauce will thin again as it sits. Cremini give more colour than white buttons.
- Scraped garlicRubbing a clove against a fine grater or the back of a knife gives a juice-like paste that disperses without leaving pieces. One small clove is ample for a pint.
- Yield and useThe recipe makes a sauce only; it says nothing about assembling or cooking the cutlets. For en papillote use, spread the cold sauce on the cooked chops and enclose in buttered parchment before finishing in the oven.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen running on French lines, and this is a textbook example: a sauce defined not by its flavour but by the job it does. En papillote — "in a paper wrapper" — cooking seals meat or fish in parchment so nothing escapes, and it needs a coating thick enough to stay put. The dish it is named for, cutlets \u is traditionally traced to Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV, though such royal attributions in nineteenth-century French cookery are more often flattery than documented fact. However the pairing of a stiff onion-and-mushroom sauce with paper-wrapped lamb chops came to be settled, by the time the Waldorf opened in the 1890s the combination was standard hotel work.