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Shallot Gravy
Put half a dozen peeled shallots into a saucepan with one wineglassful of vinegar, salt and pepper to taste and boil for eight minutes; then add one teacupful of brown gravy and boil for ten minutes longer. Before serving the gravy should be strained through a sieve.
A sharp, reduced shallot sauce of the classic escoffier-era type, built on a pre-made brown sauce rather than on pan drippings. It comes together in under twenty minutes once you have the brown gravy.
- The hinge: reduce, don't just boilThe hinge: watch the reduction -- eight minutes of boiling will take a wineglassful of vinegar down a long way while the shallots soften. Use a small saucepan so the liquid does not evaporate to dryness before they do, and pull it back if it looks like it will.
- WineglassfulIn American books of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, so a scant quarter cup of vinegar. Oscar does not specify the type; a white wine or cider vinegar suits the sauce better than distilled malt or plain white.
- TeacupfulA teacup, not a modern measuring cup: period sources put it anywhere from about 4 fl oz (a gill) to three-quarters of a cup. Either way there is substantially more brown sauce than vinegar, which is what keeps the finished gravy from being punishingly sour.
- "Brown gravy"Here this most likely means a made brown sauce of the espagnole type rather than a floured pan gravy, and certainly not a granulated mix. A good reduced beef or veal stock thickened lightly will stand in; anything thin or salty will taste harsh once reduced a second time.
- Salting orderSalt is called for at the start, but the sauce reduces twice after that. Season lightly at the outset and correct after straining, particularly if your brown sauce was already seasoned.
- StrainingThe shallots have given up their flavour by this point and are discarded; let the sauce drain through the sieve rather than forcing the solids through.
- Yield and servingA small quantity, less than you start with, since the sauce boils down a second time after the gravy goes in. It is a steak and grilled-meat sauce.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and whose 1896 Cook Book this comes from, was codifying the French repertoire as it was actually cooked in a large American hotel kitchen. This is a compact shallot sauce: shallots sweated or reduced in an acid, then let down with the house brown sauce. Its brevity is the point — in a brigade kitchen the espagnole simmered all day in a stockpot, so a cook needed only a few minutes and a ladleful of it to produce a named sauce to order. The shallot itself was still something of a marker of French cooking in American homes at the time.