Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Provincial Sauce
Provincial Sauce
Put into a saucepan two tablespoonfuls each of finely-chopped shallots and mushrooms, two cloves of garlic cut into halves, a bunch of sweet herbs and one-half teacupful of salad oil; season to taste with pepper and salt and stir the whole over the fire for a few minutes; then pour in by degrees in equal quantities some broth and white wine. When boiling move the saucepan to the edge of the fire and let the contents simmer gently for half an hour. Remove the bunch of sweet herbs, and serve the sauce.
A short, loose sauce of the old French repertoire, built on oil rather than butter and finished by reduction. It is written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, so a few of the quantities need pinning down.
- TeacupfulPeriod teacup measures varied, commonly reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful is roughly 2 to 3 fl oz of oil. Either way it is a generous amount for two tablespoons of aromatics; the oil is the body of the sauce, not just the cooking fat.
- Salad oilIn this period salad oil generally meant olive oil, though other bland oils were sold under the name too. A moderate everyday olive oil suits the long simmer better than a robust finishing oil.
- Sweet herbsA tied bunch of parsley, thyme and bay -- what a modern cook calls a bouquet garni. It is pulled out at the end, so tie it with string or it will have to be fished out leaf by leaf.
- The liquid is unmeasuredThe recipe says only "equal quantities" of broth and white wine. About a cup of each gives a sauce that reduces sensibly in half an hour; less than that and it will cook dry.
- "Move the saucepan to the edge of the fire"On a coal range the edge was the cool zone. On a burner this is the lowest setting that keeps a bare tremble on the surface -- a rolling boil will drive off the wine's aroma and split the oil out hard.
- Cook the wine downThe half hour matters more for flavour than for texture. Raw white wine tastes sharp and thin in an oil-based sauce; the simmer is what rounds it.
- It will separateThere is no flour, egg or butter mount here, so the sauce breaks into oil and broth on standing. Whisk hard off the heat just before it goes to the table, or spoon it over the dish while still moving.
- The garlicThe recipe directs only that the bunch of sweet herbs be removed, and says nothing about the halved cloves. They can be lifted out with the bundle if you want a less assertive sauce.
This is the Waldorf's version of what French kitchens called sauce provencale. The southern signature is unmistakable: olive oil in place of butter, garlic present but restrained, shallots and mushrooms doing the aromatic work. Oscar Tschirky's book is full of these translated classics, set down in the compressed style of a chef dictating to a cook who already knows the trade, which is why the broth and wine go unmeasured. Escoffier's codification of the French sauces would fix such formulas in print with far more precision; Oscar, running a hotel kitchen rather than writing a textbook, expected the man at the range to judge by eye. The absence of tomato is worth noting -- the tomato-heavy provencale familiar today became standard later.