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Shallot Sauce
(1.) Peel and slice about a dozen shallots, put them into a saucepan with one bay leaf and a small quantity of thyme and parsley tied together and a little more than one teacupful of broth. Boil the liquor until it has reduced to a glaze, then pour in one and one-half pints of clear meat gravy and leave it over the fire until boiling; then move it to the side and let it remain for ten or twelve minutes. Strain the sauce through a fine hair-sieve, and serve it. (2.) For Mutton--Chop fine a dozen or so of shallots, season them with salt and pepper, put them over the fire in one-half pint of gravy and two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, and boil for about twenty minutes.
Two sauces built on the same allium: a strained, refined version for general use and a rough, vinegar-sharpened one for mutton. Both depend entirely on the quality of the gravy you start with.
- "Clear meat gravy" means stockIn Oscar's kitchen this is a reduced, clarified brown stock or the strained pan juices of a roast, not a thickened flour gravy. A good reduced beef or veal stock, unsalted, is the modern equivalent; commercial broth will need reducing before it has any body.
- MeasuresA teacupful in period books is usually reckoned at somewhere around 5 to 6 fl oz, so "a little more than one teacupful" is roughly 3/4 cup or a touch over. One and a half pints is 3 cups. Version 2 uses half a pint, or 1 cup.
- Reduce to a glaze firstThis is the hinge of version 1. The shallots and herbs must cook down until the broth is syrupy and coats the pan, which concentrates the flavour and softens the raw allium bite. Stopping while there is still loose liquid gives a thin, oniony sauce.
- The bouquetBay, thyme and parsley tied with string is a bouquet garni; tying it means you can pull it out cleanly. Use a single bay leaf and two or three sprigs of each herb for this volume.
- "Move it to the side"On a coal range the side of the stove was the low-heat zone. Set the pan over the lowest burner or off the heat entirely for the ten to twelve minutes of infusion, and do not let it boil down further.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve was the period tool for straining sauces without metallic taint. A fine chinois or a conical strainer lined with a double layer of muslin gives the same clarity.
- Version 2 is deliberately roughNo straining is called for, so the chopped shallots stay in the sauce, and twenty minutes of boiling with vinegar cooks off the harshness while the acid cuts the fat of mutton. Use a plain wine or cider vinegar, not balsamic.
- YieldVersion 1 starts from 3 cups of gravy and loses little of it, so expect somewhere in the region of 2 1/2 cups after straining. Version 2 starts from 1 cup and twenty minutes of boiling will reduce it appreciably; the book gives no final measure for either.
Shallot sauce belongs to the classical French repertoire that Oscar Tschirky, as maitre d'hotel, oversaw in the Waldorf's dining rooms, where the menus were written for New York. The technique of reducing aromatics in stock to a glaze before mounting a sauce on more stock is the backbone of the brown sauce family, and versions of it appear under names like sauce aux echalotes and, when finished with wine and marrow, sauce bordelaise. The second formula, sharp with vinegar and left unstrained, is often said to reflect a plainer English habit: mutton was still common on American tables in 1896, and its strong fat was traditionally met with something acidic, whether caper sauce, mint, or shallots in vinegar. That the book prints both side by side is characteristic of the period, when a hotel cook needed a refined sauce for the dining room and a blunt one for the chop grill.