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Thick Gravy with Fine Herbs
Take one large onion, chop it up small and put it in a saucepan with a pat of butter and stir over the fire until lightly colored; then put in two and a half breakfast cupfuls of half glaze and a breakfast cupful of broth and boil until reduced to two-thirds; then skim it well, stir in a tablespoonful of chopped mushrooms, one tablespoonful of parsley, a pinch of sugar and a little cayenne and boil for five minutes. When about to serve squeeze in the strained juice of half a lemon.
A classic brown sauce finished with mushroom, parsley and lemon — essentially a sauce aux fines herbes built on demi-glace. Almost all the work is in the base stock, which the recipe assumes you already have.
- Half glaze"Half glaze" is demi-glace: brown veal or beef stock reduced with espagnole until it coats a spoon. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; bouillon cubes do not, as they lack the gelatin that gives the sauce body.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup and generally taken as 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Read it as a standard 8 oz cup and you will be close enough: about 2 1/2 cups demi-glace to 1 cup broth.
- Reduce to two-thirdsBest read as reducing until two-thirds of the original volume remains rather than by two-thirds, though the phrasing is ambiguous. On that reading, 3 1/2 cups comes down to roughly 2 1/3 cups.
- Skim, and keep skimmingFat and scum rise as the sauce reduces. A pan set slightly off-center on the burner will collect the scum at the cooler edge, where it is easier to lift off.
- The mushroomsRaw chopped mushroom gives up a little water. Chopping it very fine and sweating it in butter first, duxelles-style, keeps the sauce cleaner.
- Lemon last, off the heatLemon last -- The recipe adds the juice at service, not during the boil, so its freshness is not boiled away.
- Cayenne and sugarBoth are correctives, not flavors. A pinch of sugar rounds the acidity of a reduced tomato-inflected espagnole; the cayenne should be undetectable as heat.
- YieldAbout 2 to 2 1/2 cups, enough to sauce eight to ten portions of grilled or roasted meat. It holds several days refrigerated and sets to a firm jelly when cold.
Oscar Tschirky's book codified for American readers the sauce system that French kitchens ran on, and this is a workaday example of it: a mother sauce reduced down and then pointed with a small handful of aromatics just before service. "Fine herbs" is the anglicized fines herbes, though the classical quartet of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives has here shrunk to parsley alone, with mushrooms doing much of the work. The recipe's real assumption is a brigade: it presumes a stockpot of half glaze already standing at the back of the range, which is what separated a hotel like the Waldorf from a home cook working from the same book around 1896.