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Sauce Montglas
Cut one ounce of cooked smoked beef tongue into small julienne-shaped pieces, one ounce of cooked chicken, a couple of truffles and four mushrooms, all of which place in a saucepan with half a wineglassful of Madeira wine, put the pan over a brisk fire and reduce for half an hour, then add half a pint of Espagnole sauce and one gill of good tomato sauce, cook for another five minutes, and serve.
A garnish sauce built on two classical mother-sauce derivatives, so most of the work is upstream of the recipe itself. The measurements are period shorthand and one of the timings will ruin the pan if taken literally.
- The hinge: don't reduce for half an hourHalf a wineglass of Madeira is roughly 2 tablespoons (a scant fluid ounce). Over a brisk fire it will be gone in two or three minutes, and the tongue and chicken will scorch. Reduce until the pan is nearly dry — a few minutes at most — or increase the Madeira to 1/4 cup if you want the full half hour of gentle infusion.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in American cookbooks of this period is about 2 to 2 1/2 fluid ounces, not a modern stemmed pour. Oscar's "half a wineglassful" is a scant ounce.
- GillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. So: 1 cup Espagnole to 1/2 cup tomato sauce.
- EspagnoleThe brown mother sauce — brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A well-reduced veal demi-glace is the closest ready substitute; a jarred "brown gravy" is not, and will make the finished sauce taste of salt and caramel colour.
- Julienne means julienneMatchsticks about 1/8 inch square and an inch or so long, cut uniformly. This is a garnish sauce, and the pieces are meant to be visible and identical in the spoon.
- Truffles and mushrooms"A couple of truffles" most likely means small tinned black truffles, which hotel kitchens of the period kept on hand and which are expensive now; a teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle plus a little of its liquid reads honestly. The recipe does not say what kind of mushrooms, but cultivated white buttons are the likely reading. The recipe adds them raw; if you shorten the reduction as above, cook them first, or they will weep water into a sauce that has just been reduced.
- Salt and finishingNo seasoning is specified because the Espagnole and the smoked tongue are already salted. Taste at the end, and if the tomato has left it sharp, a knob of cold butter swirled off the heat rounds it out.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough to sauce four servings. Intended over veal or chicken cutlets, sweetbreads, or timbales rather than served on its own.
Montglas is one of the fixed garnishes of the classical French repertoire: a salpicon of tongue, truffle and mushroom — often with foie gras — bound with a Madeira-laced brown sauce. The name is traditionally traced to the seventeenth-century Marquis de Montglas, though as with most of these aristocratic garnish names the connection is culinary lore rather than documented fact. Its presence in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen was a French kitchen: the hotel dining room ran on a brigade system with a standing stockpot of Espagnole, so a cook could produce a sauce like this in minutes because the long labour behind it had already been done. Domestic readers buying the book got the recipe without the infrastructure, which is why so many of Oscar's instructions begin, in effect, in the middle.