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Sauce for Roasted Meats
Put a small piece of butter into a saucepan with a little chopped parsley, the juice of one lemon and a little salt, and stir about on the fire for a few minutes, then pour in one teacupful of water, and add a small quantity of meat-glaze. When boiling, the sauce is ready for pouring over the joints.
A thin lemon-parsley jus rather than a bound sauce, built on the one ingredient a modern kitchen is least likely to have on hand: meat glaze. Read that line first, because everything else is a matter of a minute or two on the heat.
- Meat-glazeThis is glace de viande — brown stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets firm when cold. A commercial demi-glace concentrate or a good reduced veal or beef stock stands in; a bouillon cube does not, being mostly salt with no body.
- A teacupfulLate-Victorian and Edwardian teacups generally run smaller than a modern measuring cup, though period sources vary, putting a teacupful at roughly 5 to 8 fl oz. The result is a loose sauce, better suited to moistening sliced meat on the platter than to coating it.
- A small piece of butterUnspecified, as many recipes of this period are. One to two tablespoons is a reasonable working range; the more butter you use, the more of it will simply float as a greasy layer once the water goes in.
- Keep the butter pale"Stir about on the fire for a few minutes" does not specify a heat level; gentle heat is the safer reading, since the lemon juice and parsley are only being warmed through, and butter that takes colour turns nutty and costs you the fresh lemon note.
- Salt lastMeat glaze is heavily reduced and carries its own salt. Add the pinch called for at the start if you like, but taste again after the glaze has dissolved rather than before.
- ParsleyParsley cooked from the beginning goes olive-drab. Holding back half of it and stirring it in off the heat keeps some green in the sauce.
- YieldRoughly a teacupful, however you reckon one; enough to spoon over a roast for a small number of servings. Make it while the joint rests and pour it out hot; it will not hold well, since nothing binds the butter to the water.
Oscar Tschirky's book catalogues the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and this is one of its short, undramatic sauces. Its logic is entirely French: a base of glace de viande, the reduced stock a professional kitchen kept on hand and used the way a home cook now uses a stock cube, brightened with lemon and parsley in the manner of a maître d'hôtel butter. The absence of flour or roux is the point — this belongs to the family of light pan sauces served with plain roasted joints, where the meat's own flavour was meant to lead. The vagueness of "a small piece of butter" and "a small quantity of meat-glaze" may be less carelessness than an assumption that the reader would know by eye what a sauce for roasted meats should look like.