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Soubise Sauce
Peel three large onions, cut them into slices, put them in a saucepan with a piece of butter, fry them, but not to color. Mix with the onions one-half pint of veal gravy, and boil until tender. Skim the sauce, pass it through a fine sieve, season it with salt and cayenne pepper, mix in one tablespoonful of hot cream, and serve.
Spanish Sauce, Espagnole Prepare a brown roux in a saucepan with one-fourth pound of butter, and four teaspoonfuls of flour, by stirring it over the fire in one direction with a wooden spoon until colored; then leave it in the saucepan until thoroughly colored. Pour in with the roux one pint of good broth, stirring it gently at the same time until smooth. Let the sauce simmer slowly for about an hour, skimming it often to clear it, then boil it briskly over the fire until reduced a little, and strain it through a fine hair-sieve. Stir the sauce in a basin until nearly cold, then put in a small lump of butter.
Two of the classic French mother-sauce derivatives, printed back to back as they would have been made on a hotel line where stock was always on hand. Both are simple; the difficulty is entirely in the base liquid.
- The hinge: do not brown the onionsSoubise depends on the onions sweating pale and sweet in butter — cover the pan and keep the heat low. Any color turns the sauce from ivory to beige and gives it a caramelized flavor that fights the cream.
- "Veal gravy" means veal stockIn this period "gravy" is a light brown stock made from veal bones and trimmings, not a thickened pan sauce. One-half pint is one cup. A good unsalted veal or light chicken stock is the practical substitute; commercial demi-glace diluted to stock strength also works.
- SievingPassing through a fine sieve is the whole texture of the sauce — press the softened onion through with a ladle rather than just draining, or you lose the body. A food mill or a brief pass with a blender before straining gets you there faster.
- The cream must be hotA tablespoon of hot cream stirred in off the heat finishes the sauce. Cold cream dropped into a hot reduction dulls it and can break the emulsion of butter and onion purée.
- The Espagnole roux proportions are suspectOne-fourth pound of butter to four teaspoonfuls of flour will not thicken anything — that is roughly 8 tablespoons of fat to under 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour. A workable brown roux uses equal weights, so read this as four tablespoonfuls of flour at minimum; the original as printed is either a misprint or assumes far more flour than it states.
- Stirring "in one direction"A period instruction with no chemical basis for a roux. What matters is constant motion over medium heat until the flour smells like toast and turns the color of a hazelnut shell — eight to fifteen minutes.
- Adding the liquidWhether stock goes in hot or cold matters less than adding it gradually and whisking; add it all at once to a hot roux and you get lumps that an hour of simmering will not dissolve.
- The finishing butterStirring the sauce until nearly cold and then adding a lump of butter reads as a keeping technique: the butter is usually understood to seal the surface against a skin forming. If you are serving immediately, whisk cold butter in off the heat for gloss instead.
- YieldThe Soubise makes enough for about four portions alongside lamb, mutton or veal. The Espagnole starts from a pint of broth and is reduced from there; it is a base, not a finished sauce.
Soubise is traditionally credited to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchens are generally said to have given the name to onion-based preparations; the attribution is customary rather than documented, and "à la Soubise" had come to mean simply "with onion purée" long before Oscar Tschirky put it in print. Espagnole — "Spanish sauce" — is the older and more consequential of the pair, one of the foundation sauces Carême codified early in the nineteenth century and Escoffier later trimmed down; its Spanish name is usually explained by the Spanish ham or tomatoes once used in the base, though no version of that story is firmly established. That both appear in a Waldorf book with such terse instructions says something about the kitchen it came from: a brigade with a stockpot permanently at the back of the range needed only a reminder of proportions, not a lesson.