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Regency Sauce
Cut half a pound of raw lean ham into slices, and place them in a saucepan, with two shallots, two onions, and a quarter of a pound of good butter, and stir over the fire for a few minutes, but without browning; then add a pint of essence of chicken and half a pint of Spanish sauce; boil until of a thick, creamy consistence; strain through a napkin, and serve when desired.
A short, rich derivative sauce that assumes two things already exist in your kitchen: a strong chicken essence and a pot of espagnole. Everything else is a twenty-minute reduction.
- Do not let it colourThe ham, shallots and onions are sweated in butter only to draw out flavour, not to brown. Keep the heat low and stir; once the butter or the ham fond takes colour the sauce turns muddy and bitter, which defeats the point of building it on an already-brown espagnole.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce: brown roux moistened with brown veal stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. A half pint is 1 cup. Buy or make it in advance; there is no shortcut inside this recipe.
- Essence of chickenNot everyday stock but a chicken stock reduced hard until it is intensely savoury and slightly viscous. A pint is 2 cups. If you use ordinary stock the sauce will need much longer boiling to thicken and will taste thin.
- Raw lean ham"Raw" here means uncooked rather than boiled or baked; the recipe does not say whether it is smoked. Something like green gammon or an unsmoked cured ham will keep the sauce clean-tasting, whereas a strongly smoked ham will push it toward bacon. Slice it thin so it gives up flavour quickly.
- SaltHam, reduced chicken essence and espagnole are all salty and the sauce is then boiled down further. Season only after straining, if at all.
- Butter quantityA quarter pound is 4 oz / 115 g, which is generous for 8 oz of ham. Much of it will float free during the reduction; skim the surface fat before straining or the finished sauce will break on the plate.
- Straining through a napkinA doubled square of muslin or cheesecloth over a fine sieve does the same job. Press the solids lightly rather than forcing them through, which would cloud the sauce.
- Yield and useExpect roughly a cup and a half of finished sauce after reduction and straining. The recipe gives no accompaniment, saying only "serve when desired"; as a thick coating sauce it would suit roast or braised poultry, sweetbreads and game birds rather than being poured freely.
Regency sauce belongs to the family of small brown sauces that French kitchens built on espagnole through the nineteenth century, each distinguished by one dominant flavouring — here raw ham and alliums, softened by a reduction of chicken essence. The name is generally traced to the Régence, the period of Philippe d'Orléans's regency in France (1715–23), which by the nineteenth century had become shorthand in cookery for anything elaborate and courtly. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book of 1896 suggests how a hotel kitchen of that scale is likely to have worked: with stockpots and a batch of espagnole already going, a sauce like this one was less a recipe than an assembly, a few minutes' work for a cook who already had the expensive parts on the stove.